


King of Infinite Space

by Elspethdixon, Seanchai



Category: Marvel 616
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, New Avengers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-23
Updated: 2008-02-23
Packaged: 2017-11-05 16:37:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 37,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/408613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elspethdixon/pseuds/Elspethdixon, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seanchai/pseuds/Seanchai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A villain from Tony's past comes back to cause trouble for the Avengers. Maybe it wouldn't have been so easy, if things weren't already so awkward over the events of Execute Program.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this fan-written work. We're paid in love, people.

Central Park after nightfall was supposed to be dangerous, but tonight, between the hundred of white candles, the tents, the tables with white linen table clothes, the paper lanterns swaying softly in the gentle September breeze, the string quartet playing tasteful classical music, and all of the chefs with foreign accents, it barely seemed like Central Park at all.   
  
Peter's bowtie was too tight, and every time he got it loosened to the point that it was comfortable, MJ would retie it to make it choking again. MJ and Tony both looked nice, but Peter was pretty sure his tux didn't quite fit, and also that it was cheaper than any other article of clothing present, including the tuxes worn by the guys strolling around with trays of champagne flutes and unidentified substances piped inside pastry puffs.   
  
Thank God for all the tents packed with gourmet chefs; if the tiny pastry puffs had been the only food available, Peter was pretty sure he would have either starved, or embarrassed himself by stealing an entire tray full. They hadn't had dinner before they'd come.   
  
"Thank you so much for getting us invitations," MJ was saying to Tony. She was wearing a sleek green dress with black scroll patterns on the neckline and hem, and shoes with stiletto heels so high that they made her the same height as Peter. The fact that she could walk in them in wet grass with no apparent trouble was both unexpectedly hot and probably some kind of secret superpower. "The director and producer of  _Phantom of the Opera_  are both here, and if they already know my name when I show up to audition for the chorus, it will be a major in."   
  
"If you want," Tony offered, "I could personally introduce you."   
  
"Okay, now I understand how you get all those women to sleep with you."   
  
"I already said I'd introduce you." Tony smiled. "You don't have to flirt. And don't say things like that so loudly; there are reporters here."   
  
"I know," Peter said. "Usually I'd be one of them." He never thought he'd miss working for J. Jonah Jameson, but when you had a camera around your neck, you were virtually invisible at these kinds of things. Part of the furniture, like the waiter with the shrimp puffs (at least, Peter thought they were shrimp). As it was, he was sure people were staring at him and silently judging him. Two people had already asked him who he was, and then looked politely puzzled when he told them his name.   
  
Most of the guests at the Central Park Conservancy Dinner were a lot more high profile than Peter Parker. Like, for example, Dr. Henry Pym.   
  
At least, Peter was pretty sure the blond man hurrying up to them was Dr. Pym; he recognized him from the grainy, black and white stock photo that the Journal of Biochemistry always printed at the end of his articles.   
  
"Hank." Tony grinned, extending a hand for the other man to shake. "I didn't know you and Jan were back from England yet."   
  
"We got back a couple of days ago. What are you doing here?" Dr. Pym frowned. "You were in a hospital bed a week ago. You should be at home resting."   
  
Oh, right. Because Hank Pym was also Ant-Man (or Giant-Man, or Yellowjacket, or whatever he was going by now), and had been one of the founding Avengers, and therefore would know that Tony Stark was Iron Man, and that it had been Tony who had nearly been killed last week when his armor had been hacked.   
  
On second thought, maybe Peter had recognized him from one of the giant oil paintings in Stark Tower.   
  
"Why are you even trying, dear?" a petite woman whom Peter assumed was Janet Van Dyne, also known as the Wasp, stepped over to stand at Dr. Pym's elbow. "It's not like he'll listen."   
  
"I'm fine," Tony protested. "The hospital wouldn't have let me go otherwise."   
  
Peter knew for a fact -- because he'd heard Tony and Cap arguing about it -- that Tony had actually checked himself out against medical advice. The doctors had wanted to keep him for two more days.   
  
"You're Janet Van Dyne, aren't you?" MJ said, extending a hand. "I saw the showing for your fall line last year. It was brilliant."   
  
Ms. Van Dyne shrugged. "It's dead to me now."   
  
MJ smiled. "I guess a great designer never looks back."   
  
Peter was pretty sure she was quoting  _The Incredibles_ . There were times when he really loved his wife.   
  
"Speaking of brilliant," Peter said, "I thought your article on the effects of electronic impulses on pheromone production in argentine ant colonies was fascinating." Some of the principles had been similar to the ones he'd used to design his spider-trackers, and the article had helped him further refine them.   
  
Dr. Pym smiled. "I'd initially planned to use fire ants for that study, but they wouldn't let me import them into Britain, even when I explained that the climate wasn't right for them to survive in the wild."   
  
"See." Tony smirked at Peter. "And you were worried you'd be bored here."   
  
"You set this up, didn't you?" Peter asked.   
  
"Actually, I had no idea they were going to be here. I thought you were still in England," he added, to Dr. Pym and Ms. Van Dyne. "Are you back to stay or just visiting?"   
  
"To stay, of course," Ms. Van Dyne said. She shrugged one bare shoulder -- her dress was a red and black silk off the shoulder thing. Even to Peter, who knew nothing about fashion, it looked expensive. The single large pearl that dangled just below her collarbones also looked expensive, as did the matching earrings. It must be nice to be rich. "After New York, Oxford was boring."   
  
"Which lab do you work for?" Dr. Pym asked Peter. "Or are you one of Tony's new pet scientists?"   
  
"I'm a high school science teacher," Peter admitted. It was mildly embarrassing to have to say as much in front of a guy who'd been nominated for a Nobel Prize; it was kind of nice that Dr. Pym had thought Peter was a real scientist, if only for a minute or so.   
  
"I'm working on stealing him for my R and D department," Tony said, shrugging. "I dragged him along to this thing because I was worried that I'd be bored."   
  
Peter saw Ms. Van Dyne's eyes narrow a moment before a voice from behind them said, "Really? I've never known you to be bored anywhere they were serving champagne."   
  
Tony's entire body went stiff, and he turned sharply on his heel. Peter spun around to see what this apparent threat might be, and saw a big, attractive blond man in a wheelchair. He was smiling up at Tony dazzlingly.   
  
"Tiberius," Tony said, voice strangled.   
  
"Surprised to see me?" the man asked. He reached out and clasped Tony's hand in both of his, fingers locking around his wrist. If possible, Tony stiffened further.   
  
"It's all right," the man went on cheerfully. "I can admit, I'm honestly surprised to be here myself. According to the doctors, they thought I'd never wake up." He still had his hands locked around Tony's fingers.   
  
Tony yanked his hand free with more force than the loose grasp should have called for. "What are you doing here?"   
  
Tiberius shrugged. "When my DreamVision Technology malfunctioned and put me in that coma, I ought to have been as good as dead. Instead I'm, well, not exactly walking around, but still damn lucky. The doctors say it was nothing short of a miracle that I woke up. Given that, how can I not take the opportunity to give something back to the city?" He gestured expansively with both arms. "And what better place to start than our lovely park?"   
  
"Well, the school system could use some help." Peter said. He didn't know who this guy was, but he was rating an eight out of ten on Peter's smarm-o-meter. There was something about the wide smile he was giving Tony that was just... weird. Peter wasn't sure, but he thought maybe this Tiberius was flirting with Tony. Or at least, trying to.   
  
"I see," Ms. Van Dyne said coolly. "Trying to buy your way back into polite society after an extended absence?"   
  
"Why, Janet," Tiberius turned his smile on her. "you should know I've never had to buy my way into anyone's good graces. It's lovely to see you again, too," he went on. "I have fond memories of that weekend in Paris all those years ago."   
  
"It's nice that one of us does."   
  
"Why such a cold reception from two old friends?" Tiberius looked honestly hurt, but Peter was pretty sure he was faking it. "Tony, I hope we haven't had some kind of falling out. I can't remember anything from the months before my accident. The doctors say the DreamVision was influencing my neural functions. It's all a horrible blur." He looked down, frowning. "I'd hate to think that I might have alienated my oldest friend."   
  
Tony was usually good at smooth-talking people -- or, at the very least, Peter had never seen him honestly lost for words -- but that had apparently deserted him, because now he was staring at Tiberius, face completely devoid of expression.   
  
Dr. Pym and Ms. Van Dyne were also pretty much gaping at him. There was clearly some kind of history here.   
  
"I have, haven't I?" Tiberius reached for Tony's hand again. "Come on, Marc Anthony, let me make it up to you."   
  
Tony jerked his hand back out of the man's reach. "Your little games aren't going to work this time, Tiberius. I know what you really are, now."   
  
Tiberius's smile faltered for a second, then returned, full strength. "I can see I'll have to work on you." He turned to MJ. "Miss Van Dyne and her escort I know, but I don't believe I've ever had the pleasure of your company before."   
  
MJ gave him the stare she usually reserved for tabloid reporters. "You haven't," she said flatly.   
  
"I didn't think so. I'm sure I would have remembered such a lovely young woman. I'm Tiberius Stone, and you are..."   
  
"Married."   
  
Dr. Pym snickered audibly.   
  
"It's been lovely seeing you, Tiberius," Ms. Van Dyne said, in a tone that implied the exact opposite, "but I'm sure you're just dying to get caught up with all of your old acquaintances, and it would be terribly rude for us to take up all of your time." She smiled at him sweetly. "I think I see Norman Osborn over there, and I'm sure Sebastian Shaw is hanging around the food tent somewhere."   
  
"And I think Adrian Toombs is out of jail now," Dr. Pym offered.    
  
He wasn't -- Peter kept tabs on that sort of thing -- but obviously this Tiberius Stone was a supervillain or ex-supervillain who had tangled with Tony or the Avengers. He just wasn't sure which one. The Avengers fought a lot of people.   
  
The name sounded familiar, though. Peter was sure he'd heard it somewhere before.   
  
Tiberius Stone offered them all one last toothpaste commercial smile. "I suppose I'll be taking my leave, then. I'm sure I'll see you later, Tony. Jan." He began wheeling himself away, the wheelchair leaving two long furrows in the wet grass.   
  
Tony watched him go, rubbing at his wrist. "You know," he said wryly, "I think he scratched me with his ring." He looked pale, and kind of dazed.   
  
Dr. Pym was right; he probably should be home in bed. Just a week ago, Peter had been sure that he was dead. He'd stopped his own heart to put his commandeered armor out of commission, and they hadn't been able to get it beating again until more than half an hour later.   
  
The ambulance guys had had to haul Cap off of him in order to take over CPR, and it had taken four of them to do it. The part where Tony had looked dead had been terrifying enough all on its own, but Cap's expression when the paramedics had pulled him away from Tony had been its own kind of scary. "Scary" had never been a concept Peter had associated with Captain America before.   
  
"You don't look that good," Peter pointed out. "Do you want to go home?"   
  
Tony shook his head, visibly pulling himself together. "I promised I'd introduce MJ to that director."   
  
"Oh, right, you're an actress, aren't you?" Ms. Van Dyne asked, turning to MJ. "If you want an introduction to some Broadway people, I know several. I'm in negotiations to design the costumes for one of the new productions."    
  
"I think I might leave a little early," Tony admitted, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. "The company here leaves something to be desired. That is," he added to Peter and MJ, "if you two wouldn't mind?"   
  
"Can I go home with him?" Peter said.   
  
MJ shrugged. "Sure. Thank you for coming in the first place. And not whining too much." She leaned over to fiddle with Peter's bowtie again, even though he'd very carefully not tugged on it this time and it couldn't possibly need fixing. It belatedly dawned on him that this might be an excuse to touch him.   
  
"I could put the bowtie back on when you get home, so you can play with it more," Peter suggested.   
  
MJ quickly withdrew her hand, but winked at him. "Go home," she said.    
  
Tony had his cell phone out and was calling his chauffer. "Okay, I'll meet you in ten minutes."   
  
"Good luck with the director," Peter said. "If he wants you to try out his casting couch, say no."   
  
MJ whacked him on the arm. "You never know. I might say yes. I like men in tuxes. Ties are optional, though."   
  
"Come on," Tony said. "Happy's going to meet us by the gate."   
  
Score. This meant he got to take off the tie.   
  
  
  


***

 

Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin were currently stranded on a barren rock in the middle of the ocean, facing inevitable death. However, since there were fifteen more books in Patrick O'Brien's apparently endless C. S. Forrester homage, Steve was pretty sure they were going to be rescued.

He was not waiting up until Tony came back from his party. He had just gotten caught up in his book, and stayed up reading; something he rarely had the time to do. The fact that he was reading in the living room where he'd be within easy earshot of anyone arriving in the elevator had nothing to do with Tony; it was simply a pleasant, well-lit place to read.

Frequently, if Tony didn't have a date to a particular social function -- and he hadn't, since Rumiko -- he would take Steve. This time around, he hadn't asked. As much as Steve might wish otherwise, he and Tony weren't actually involved with one another, and Tony was certainly under no obligation to ask him.

So Steve hadn't said anything, mostly because it would have been uncomfortable. Tony had no interest in men; his long string of girlfriends testified to that, and Steve knew it was selfish of him to want something that Tony couldn't give. After all, Tony had been willing to trade his life for Steve's; how could he possibly ask for more than that?

Things had... awkward, with Tony lately. He strongly suspected that Tony had been avoiding him, but couldn't entirely blame Tony for that, since Steve had spectacularly failed to notice that Tony was being mind-controlled and used as a weapon until it was far too late to do anything about it. If he had been paying attention, like he should have been, Tony wouldn't have had to stop his own heart. To save him.

Steve turned another page in his book. Stephen proceeded to explain the names and eating habits of every seabird on the island to Aubrey, which was probably fair trade for Aubrey's equally detailed explanations of the inner workings of various eighteenth century British Naval ships.

If he were completely honest with himself, he had to admit that he'd been avoiding Tony, as well. What could you say to someone who'd stopped his heart for you, whom you'd watched nearly die?

There had been a bit when he'd thought Tony was dead. It had taken nearly fifteen minutes for the ambulance to get there, but it had felt like much longer.

There was a soft chime from the elevator, and Steve heard the doors slide open. 

"Come on, I know that guy is a supervillain," Peter's voice drifted around the corner. "Which one is he?"

Tony and Peter stepped in to Steve's line of sight from behind the fireplace. Peter had removed his tie and wrapped it around one hand, and Tony's tie was undone, hanging loose around his neck. Steve had always been slightly envious of how good Tony looked in tuxedos. He looked even better like this, with his collar open just a bit, revealing a flash of his collarbone.

"So," Steve asked, closing his book and standing, "how was the party?" He hadn't expected them back for at least another hour. He surreptitiously eyed Tony, looking for any sign of ill health. Tony hadn't been breathing when the ambulance had gotten there, and he'd left the hospital against doctors' orders. He didn't look like he was suffering any delayed reaction, though. "And where's MJ?"

Peter shrugged one shoulder. "She's still at the party; Ms. Van Dyne was going to introduce her to some theatre people."

Steve turned to Tony, frowning. He hadn't seen Jan since she and Hank had left for Great Britain. "I didn't know Jan was going to be there," he said. If he had, he would have asked for an invitation after all.

Tony offered him a small, slightly lopsided smile. "The English customs department wouldn't let Hank import fire ants, so they moved back. There were all kinds of unexpected arrivals tonight." From the tone of his voice, either his cousin Morgan had shown up to ask for money, or Sebastian Shaw had extended another invitation to join the Hellfire Club.

Peter snorted. "Like that creepy guy in the wheelchair who hit on you."

"Professor Xavier was there?" Luke said, stepping into the room from the hallway that led to the kitchen. Behind him, Jessica Jones snickered.

"No," Peter shook his head, "not a creepy bald guy. A creepy blond guy. He looked kind of like Cap, if Cap were in a wheelchair and had a goatee. And was skeezy and maybe a supervillain. He was practically drooling on MJ, too."

Steve felt a sinking sensation in his stomach. Peter's slightly incoherent description sounded unfortunately familiar.

Tony sighed. "Tiberius Stone was there," he said, sounding suddenly tired.

Jessica Jones frowned. "Isn't he that media mogul who owns half the television stations on the Eastern Seaboard and Barbara Walters' soul? I thought he put himself in a coma with some kind of experimental VR technology."

" _That's_  where I knew the name from," Peter said, snapping his fingers. "He's the dead DreamVision guy. Jameson used to run editorials about how his video games encouraged teenage delinquency. Wait, he's a supervillain?  _Were_  they evil video games?"

"Knowing Stone, quite possibly." Steve said. He had vivid memories of the media smear campaign Tiberius Stone had subjected Tony to, as well as Tony's account of Stone's attempt to trap him in a virtual reality program and kill him. 

Even before learning that Stone had been behind the sudden onslaught of tabloid attacks, Steve had thought there was something off about the way Stone had acted towards Tony. It had been obvious to him from the beginning that Stone was a manipulative bastard who invaded people's personal space incessantly. Tony, meanwhile, had insisted that "Ty" was one of his oldest friends, and was just a very tactile person. He'd continued to defend the man while reporters savaged him in every news magazine Stone published and every television channel Stone had a controlling interest in, right up until Stone had tried to kill him.

"Are you all right?" Steve asked, resisting the impulse to place a hand on Tony's arm. "He didn't try anything, did he?"

"Nothing to write home about." Tony's brief half-smile was cynical. "He's a changed man. He has amnesia. He wants to know what he's done to alienate me."

"What has he done?" Luke asked. "I don't remember ever hearing about this guy."

"Well, to begin with, he had his own parents murdered," Tony said flatly. "Everything else pretty much pales beside that."

Jessica stopped hanging in the doorway, stepping around Luke and going to sit in one of the leather armchairs. "Was he behind that smear campaign someone set you up for a couple of years ago? He owned most of those television stations, didn't he?"

"Yes." Tony's shoulders slumped slightly. "It's a long story."

"He's dangerous," Steve said. He folded his arms across his chest, thinking. "Do you have any idea how he recovered from that coma?" People did make miraculous recoveries sometimes, but there were rarely any coincidences when dealing with supervillains, even ones without code names and costumes.

"No. He's claiming it was a miracle. If I know him, he's angling for public sympathy." Tony took off his suit jacket and threw it on to the couch, then dropped heavily into the chair across from Jessica. "We're going to have to keep an eye on him."

He slumped forward for a second, rubbing at his face with both hands. "I'm going to go to bed," he said, through his fingers. He stood, and walked off to vanish around the corner of the fireplace, in the direction of the elevator, instead of his bedroom. He was going to go work on the armor, Steve knew. It was what Tony did anytime something was bothering him.

"So, he is a supervillain, right?" Peter asked, cocking his head to one side.

"I don't know, man, but I can't believe you left your wife at some swanky party full of old rich guys. Half of them are probably cruising for a mistress," Luke said, smirking.

Jessica raised her eyebrows. "It's a sign of trust, jackass."

"MJ can take care of herself," Peter said, "and I left her with the Wasp and Dr. Pym, so I figure she's pretty safe from the wiles of sketchy old guys."

Steve stared at the corner Tony had disappeared around. He should have gone after him, but what had happened with the armor was still hanging between them. He wouldn't have been able to think of anything to say, anyway.

 

 

***

 

"And then he said that he'd be sure to keep me in mind, which was a complete lie, of course, but it was nice to hear." MJ poured milk onto her rice krispies and stirred them around with her spoon, taking a bite. "I can't believe I got to meet Janet Van Dyne. I know she's the Wasp, but she's also one of the top ten most powerful businesswomen in New York City, and her designs..." She shook her head, gesturing expansively with her spoon. "I always wanted to wear one when I was modeling, but I never got the chance."

"Buy one, then." Luke shrugged, obviously less than interested in the conversation. He was feeding Danielle some kind of pale orange mush, and making faces at her to get her to open her mouth for the spoon. Steve was almost certain that he didn't realize he was doing it, since there was no way Luke would willingly look that ridiculous in front of everyone else.

"Do you have any idea how much an original Van Dyne costs?" Jessica Jones asked him.

Luke raised his eyebrows. "A lot?"

"More than a lot," MJ said. "You'd have to be a celebrity to afford one." 

"You were totally the best looking woman there, and your dress came from Macy's," Peter assured her. He was adding cocoa powder and sugar to his rice krispies, which apparently made them taste just like Cocoa Krispies. Jarvis would have been utterly appalled.

MJ rolled her eyes. "Thank you, Peter. That was very helpful."

"What? You were."

Steve ate his breakfast in silence, listening to the conversation but not joining in. It was nearly seven-thirty; Tony should have been sitting at the breakfast table by now, sullenly clutching a coffee mug. He might not be a morning person, but he always tried to get in to work early these days. That didn't make him any more cheerful in the mornings, though.

Even if he had overtired himself last night, it wasn't likely that he would still be asleep; knowing Tony, he had multiple fancy alarm clocks specifically to prevent oversleeping. He had looked all right last night, but then, Tony had always been good at concealing ill health, and he'd gotten out of the hospital barely a week ago.

If Steve had to make a bet, he'd put his money on Tony's still being in the lab, overhauling his armor. He'd been obsessively checking it and rechecking it over the past week, as if afraid that someone would slip remote control devices in when he wasn't looking. And then there had been Stone's unwelcome return last night, and the fact that Tony always worked on his armor any time anything was bothering him.

Steve wondered if he'd even gone to bed. He ought to go downstairs and check. He could claim that he was bringing Tony coffee.

It always felt a little strange to ride an elevator so far down; Tony's workshop was in the tower's sub-basement, and the Avengers' living quarters were dozens of stories and six security checks above it. Luckily, the elevator was a fast one, so the coffee was still hot when he reached the bottom.

Tony was sitting on a lab stool, hunched forward over a workbench, doing something with a tiny welding pen, tweezers, and a very, very small piece of circuitry. He was wearing a regular suit in place of last night's tuxedo, the tie sitting on the bench side him, but going by the circles under his eyes, Steve had been right about the not sleeping.

Steve stepped forward, holding out the coffee mug. "Good morning."

Tony put down the welding pen and rubbed a hand over his face, closing his eyes for a second. "Is that for me?"

"I thought you might need it," Steve said, handing him the coffee. Since you've been up for twenty-four hours straight, he added silently. "I didn't expect Tiberius Stone to come back," he said tentatively, as Tony took his first sip of coffee, eyes closed and wearing the blissful expression with which he always greeted coffee after a long night. Steve could see the muscles in his throat move as he swallowed. "It must have been like seeing a ghost."

Tony opened his eyes, regarding Steve seriously over the rim of the coffee mug. "It was, but it's not like he actually did anything. I'm fine, Steve."

Tony was always 'fine.' "Look, last week was--" Steve began, knowing he needed to say something -- should have said something a week ago, in fact -- but still not knowing how to start.

"I don't know how I can apologize," Tony interrupted. He set the coffee mug down on the bench in front of him, staring into it. "I swore, last time, after Kang, that I would never let something like this happen again, and..." he trailed off, still staring intently into the dark surface of the coffee. "I could have killed you. I'm sorry."

"That's not-" Steve broke off, shaking his head. Tony wasn't making this any easier. "I should have noticed that something was wrong. Are you sure you're all right?"

"Completely," Tony said, in a tone of voice clearly chosen to shut down this line of conversation. "The Extremis could handle it, and I was only out for a little while, anyway."

Steve clenched the fingers of his right hand into a fist, jaw tightening. A little while? Hell, it had been thirty-seven minutes. Tony had stopped breathing, his heart had stopped beating, for  _thirty-seven minutes_ .

The Extremis's healing factor wasn't like Logan's -- it worked gradually, on a cellular level -- and none of them had known that it would be enough to keep Tony alive and undamaged.

"Stone didn't ruin the party for MJ, at least," Steve said, not wanting to talk -- or think -- about Tony's brush with death any longer. "She really enjoyed meeting Jan."

Tony's lips curved in a half-hearted smile. "So did I. Hank too. Now that they're back, we should have them over." He stood, picking up the tie and looping it around his neck. "I have to get to work; there's a meeting at eight."

"You know if you need anything," Steve started, "I-"

"Thanks for the coffee," Tony said. And then he was gone.

 

 

***

 

The giant wrecking ball whipped through the air, smashing a store's display window into powder. "What are you going to do, send us back to jail?" Thunderball flicked the handle of his makeshift weapon into the air again, then began swinging it around his head, like Thor spinning Mjolnir. He had always been fond of posturing, Tony reflected. 

"I think we've already established the futility of that course of action," Thunderball continued. 

And sneering. He was fond of sneering as well. The rest of the Wrecking Crew just liked smashing things. Thunderball liked smashing things, too, of course, but he was more annoying about it. He'd also tried to tarnish a perfectly good Bond movie by naming himself after it.

Dr. Eliot Franklin had been a brilliant physicist once; Tony had never been able to figure out why he'd decided that donning a bright green and yellow costume and joining a group of demolition-themed supervillains was what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Usually, when scientists decided to turn to a life of supervillainy, they chose a more technologically advanced means of wreaking havoc.

Logan popped his claws, the adamantium gleaming in the bright sunlight. "Maybe this time we'll try sending you back in pieces."

The four members of the Wrecking Crew had broken out of the Raft during the mass escape last month. No one had seen or heard from them since then, until this morning, when they had reappeared as if from nowhere, and started destroying stores on 34th Street, grabbing anything they could take as they went.

Steve arched his body over backwards at the waist, letting the Wrecker's crowbar whistle harmlessly through the space where his head had been an instant before. Seeing that never failed to impress Tony; the only other person he'd even seen bend like that was Peter, and he had non-human physiology and a lot less muscle mass than Steve.

"You know," Steve commented to him, "it's times like this that I really miss Thor."

"You and me both," Tony said. He sent a stream of repulsor energy toward the Wrecker, hitting him solidly between the shoulder blades. It burned a hole in his green coat and staggered him forward a step, but didn't take him down. Tony hadn't expected it to; the Wrecking Crew might not be very creative, but they were nearly indestructible. "Spiderman, see if you can get that crowbar away from him."

"Sorry, a little busy here." Peter shot a webline at a nearby lamppost, and used it to swing himself up off the sidewalk just before Thunderball's wrecking ball slammed into the piece of pavement he'd been standing on. The sidewalk crumbled around the impact site, and Peter, now hanging upside-down from the top of the lamppost, sent twin streams of webbing at the giant steel ball, gluing it to the sidewalk.

Thunderball tugged at the chain, his face contorted in frustration. Peter's new organic webbing had more tensile strength than the old chemical kind, and only a few stands snapped.

"Let me help you with that," Logan said. He swiped at the chain with his claws, slicing the links in half.

Thunderball, who had been pulling at the trapped weapon with all of his considerable strength, fell backwards, sitting down hard in the street. The severed end of the chain snapped back to hit him in the face, hard enough to knock a normal person unconscious. "You're going to pay for that, you witless animal," he spat, bringing the back of one yellow-gloved hand to his split lip.

Steve threw his shield at the Wrecker, knocking the enchanted crowbar from his hand, and Tony hit the man with another repulsor blast, this time managing to actually send him to his knees. The crowbar hit the pavement with a clang, and was snatched away by a webline.

"I'm gonna kill you, you tin plated bastard," the Wrecker growled. He climbed back to his feet, taking a step towards Steve and drawing back a fist. "But first, you're going down. Remember when Thunderball broke your jaw? You're gonna wish you had it that easy this time. You'll be picking your teeth up off the fucking asphalt."

Beyond him, Luke was slugging it out with Piledriver, dodging punches from the man's oversized fists. Both of them seemed to be enjoying it. Bulldozer, the Wrecking Crew's fourth member, was clutching his face and whimpering; Spiderwoman had just sent a venom blast straight into his eyes.

Steve caught the Wrecker's punch on his shield; Tony had fought alongside him long enough that he noticed the small step backward Steve took as the impact staggered him, but he doubted anyone else did.

Tony shut off his bootjets, landing just behind the Wrecker, and tapped him on the shoulder, then threw a mailed punch at his jaw. He could feel the impact all the way up his arm, but all the Wrecker did was shake his head once and blink. Then Steve kicked his feet out from under him.

He hit the ground with a thud, and Tony reached down and slapped a small electronic device onto his chest, triggering it with the Extremis as he did so. The Wrecker convulsed once, tiny crackles of electricity running over the surface of his body, then went limp.

There was another thud from behind them, and Tony turned to see Thunderball sitting on the ground again, looking dazed. Bulldozer was standing over him, metal helmet knocked askew, face reddened, and eyes streaming tears, saying, "Sorry, sorry. I thought you was Wolverine."

Thunderball hit him across the knees with the remnants of his chain, then fell over sideways, out cold.

Steve exchanged glances with Tony, grinning broadly, and Tony found himself grinning back, even though he knew Steve wouldn't be able to see it, not with the helmet hiding his face. The satisfaction was short-lived, though; Steve had no reason to smile at him like that these days, after the hacker controlling Tony's armor had come so close to killing him. It was his feelings for Steve that had put him in danger in the first place. The armor had been responding to his thoughts, his subconscious cues, and it had known exactly what would hurt Tony the most.

By the time the police arrived a few minutes later, all four members of the Wrecking Crew were securely tied up with Peter's webbing. Thunderball, Bulldozer, and the Wrecker were all unconscious, and Piledriver was cradling his bound hands to his chest, complaining that Luke had broken his fingers.

The New Avengers stuck around long enough to see them loaded into an armored car -- it took three policemen to carry the Wrecker -- and then returned to Stark Tower.

Tony was silent on the way back, busy pulling up the profiles of all the Raft escapees via the Extremis. The Wrecking Crew never worked on their own; they didn't have that kind of initiative. They were always on somebody's payroll. He couldn't think of a single higher-level villain whose agenda would be advanced by knocking over jewelry stores, though.

Whomever had hired them, chances were he -- or she -- would have paid well enough to ensure their silence on the subject, so it was likely that they'd heard the last of them for several weeks at least, unless Bulldozer tried to sue Jessica Drew for temporarily blinding him.

Tony added the looming threat of the Wrecking Crew's possible employer to the ever-growing list of looming threats, which at this point included Tiberius, the unidentified person or persons behind the Raft breakout, Maria Hill and whatever she was doing with SHIELD, and Hydra, then went on with his day. He was therefore completely unprepared for it when Pepper and Happy burst into his office the next morning.

"I can't believe that scum," Happy was snarling. "Some people got no gratitude at all."

"Go find a television and put on channel fourteen," Pepper told Tony. "You're going to want to see this."

Tony set down the budget proposal he was going through and sorted through the myriad of muted datastreams he could sense with the Extremis until he found channel fourteen's morning talk show. When he opened up the datafeed, he found himself confronted with Tiberius Stone's somber face.

"As a native New Yorker, I find this incident especially painful," Ty was saying. Tony knew for a fact that Ty had spent half his life in Europe, and most of his childhood at school in New England, so what was he playing at now?

"What I want to know, John," Ty went on, "and I think I speak for a great many of us, is who will be paying for this wanton destruction?"

"The Maria Stark foundation has always paid for the worst of the damages inflicted on the city during altercations involving the Avengers," the host said. "I understand the city has already billed the foundation for the damage to the street and sidewalk, and funds are being given to several of the stores' proprietors to repair the destroyed storefronts."

Ty shook his head, frowning. "Yes, but the owners of those destroyed storefronts will be losing business while their establishments are under construction, and in this city, three weeks without business is a major financial loss. Who's going to pay for that?"

Once upon a time, Tony might have been surprised or hurt, but at this point, he couldn't even summon up the energy for anger. He'd been expecting something like this ever since he'd seen Tiberius at that party. Ty always preferred to attack from a distance rather than face to face. By tomorrow, he'd probably have leaked false information about Stark Enterprise's financial situation to the New York Times, and then Tony would have another crisis of shareholder confidence on his hands.

"I've been looking for a cause to devote my energies to ever since I woke up," Ty went on, his perfectly modulated baritone dripping sincerity, "some way to use this second chance I've been given to make a difference. This, this senseless destruction caused by superpowered arrogance, has given me that. These constant battles between criminals and vigilantes are simply proof that people should not possess such dangerous abilities or use them so freely, just as I shouldn't have used the DreamVision so carelessly. People will be hurt. The city, or possibly even the state government, should do something about this."

Tony dropped his head into his hands, suppressing a groan. Steve and the others didn't deserve the trouble this was going to bring.

"I am using my own money to further compensate the victims of this disaster, and the Reverend Arnold Hathart has started a charity fund to assist the victims of superpowered disasters."

"I wasn't aware that you were involved in any religious ministries, Mr. Stone."

Ty smiled self-deprecatingly. "Call it a side-effect of a near-death experience. I truly believe that my recovery is the work of a higher power. My doctors can't explain it to me; they insist that I should never have been able to wake up. I've been given a miracle, and I'm not going to let that go to waste."

Tony shut the datafeed off in disgust. Pepper and Happy were staring at him, Pepper with her nose wrinkled and Happy with his usual solemn expression.

"You got any idea how creepy it is when you do that, boss?" Happy asked.

"If I know Ty," Tony said to Pepper, "every news station in the city is about to call and ask for an official statement on behalf of the Maria Stark foundation. Make sure you don't give them anything other than the usual PR statement. We're not going to play his games."

"That creep," Pepper spat. "I can't believe he's doing this again." She strode over to his desk, high heels rapping out her irritation on the floor, and snatched the discarded budget proposal away from him, bending the cover leaf in the process. "I'll give this to legal. And tell them to get ready for somebody to sue us."

"Come on," Happy shook his head. "Nobody's actually going to start a lawsuit over this; they can't sue Stark Enterprises for something the Avengers did; they're not SE employees, and the Maria Stark foundation's a whole separate legal deal."

Pepper snorted. "Since when has that ever stopped anybody? By the time judge threw the case out of court, our stock would already be in the basement." She turned to Tony, and said plaintively, "You're sure we can't try the offensive tack this time?"

"And launch our own smear campaign against a philanthropist in a wheelchair?" Tony asked dryly, raising his eyebrows. "The press would really love us for that. Anyway, I think we're over-reacting here. He's not actually going after S.E."

"Yet," Pepper muttered darkly.

"He's obviously up to something with that phony born-again do-gooder crap," Happy said. "The only religion that guy's found is Sweet Jesus of Convenience. Don't forget about how he bugged your office and tried to kill you."

"Not much chance of that," Tony assured him. "But he's not actually making any accusations. He's just a concerned citizen who wants more accountability for superheroes. If we get defensive, we'll be playing right into his hands."

Unless Tiberius actually  _was_  sincere, and truly had lost the memories surrounding the DreamVision plot. Tony wouldn't have bet a plugged nickel on the chances of that being true, but it was  _possible_ .

After all, he knew better than anyone how people's personalities could be affected by technological mind control. Maybe that coma really had changed Tiberius; he seemed just as false and smarmy as ever, but Tony might be projecting his own knowledge of Ty's past betrayals onto his current behavior.

Or he could simply have changed his tactics, and decided to give up on his attacks on Tony Stark in favor of going after Iron Man. Thanks to the time he'd spent roaming around Tony's psyche with the Dream Vision, he knew perfectly well that Tony Stark and his armored bodyguard were one and the same.

 

 

***


	2. Chapter 2

Over the past few years, Steve had gotten used to media barrages. This time, at least, there were no reporters and protestors camping out on the Avengers' lawn. Of course, if Stark Tower had had a lawn, he was sure they would have been there.  
  
The past two weeks, since the fight with the Wrecking Crew, had seen the news media turn on superheroes like sharks the had caught the scent of blood. Some so-called priest named Arnold Hathart had been all over every talk radio station and t.v. talk show, preaching that superpowers were "not part of God's natural plan," and that they were a destructive influence on the youth of the nation. A number of conservative religious leaders had jumped in to support him, several of the more fanatical ones doing him one better by proclaiming that superpowers were manifestations of Satan, and that close study of the Book of Revelations revealed that the antichrist would be a mutant.  
  
Inexplicably, people were actually listening to him. And those that weren't  _were_  listening to Tiberius Stone's claims that superhuman fights hurt innocent bystanders. Thanks to the fact that Stone owned half the news outlets in the state, the natural rebuttal -- that letting supervillains run around unopposed hurt a lot more people -- was going unheard.  
  
Last night, Reverend Hathart had appeared on  _60 Minutes_ , telling the interviewing team that, thanks to "these misguided people," criminals and "so-called heroes" alike, "decent, normal people" were "afraid to walk the streets of New York City." Even more amazing than his ability to say this with a straight face was the fact the men and women interviewing him had been taking his claims completely seriously.  
  
Then, even more unbelievably, Mac Gargan, better known to the public and New York State parole boards as "The Scorpion," had been interviewed. He'd claimed that he was reformed now (on this, his fifth prison sentence) and that it was "the madness brought on by his powers" that had caused him to turn to a life of crime, by alienating him from society. He'd gone on to say that he wished he'd never acquired them, that he was normal, or that he'd at least had "some kind of guidance or control available" when he'd received them.  
  
Peter had been so livid that he'd had to leave the room, snarling as he went that supervillains always got better press than he did (" _How can anybody buy this crap? That's a blatant lie! The only thing he regrets is that now he's ugly!_ ").  
  
Not a single one of  _60 Minutes'_  numerous interview subjects had expressed a dissenting opinion. The entire thing felt fishy to Steve; what were the chances that this many people suddenly felt this threatened by superpowers, all at once, in the relative absence of any kind of superhuman-related disaster? The misuse of superpowers was a valid concern, as was the potential for superheroes to turn to vigilante violence, as witnessed by the mere existence of the Punisher. The fact that all of these concerned citizens had chosen to air their criticism en mass, via television stations and magazines owned by Tiberius Stone struck Steve as more than a little suspicious, given Stone's past history with using the media to carry out personal vendettas.  
  
However, on the off chance that this anti-superhero crusade Stone was sponsoring represented real worry on his part over the dangers posed by out-of-control superhumans, Steve had decided that they needed to speak with him. After all, it  _could_  turn out that he had some legitimate reason behind his concerns, something that honestly needed to be dealt with, but had gotten lost amidst all the media's habit of going straight for the most sensational part of a story and ignoring the more important but less interesting parts. Or, if as Steve strongly suspected, Stone was actually using the media to manipulate the public for some more nefarious purpose, confronting him directly couldn't hurt.  
  
Steve, Tony, and Luke had been waiting in the sitting room outside Stone's office for -- Steve checked his watch -- fifteen minutes now, despite the fact that they'd made an appointment. It was just the three of them; Jessica Drew had flatly refused to have anything to do with Stone, Logan was not the sort of person one brought to what was intended to be a polite meeting, and, given Peter's current state of irritation, Steve had thought it best not to bring him along.  
  
Stone's secretary, a tall, curvaceous blonde with a conservative suit but extremely high heels, finally emerged from his office, shutting the door behind her. "Mr. Stone will see you now," she said, unsmiling. "I hope you haven't been waiting long."  
  
"We had an appointment for eleven," Luke said. "He knows exactly how long we've been waiting."  
  
"Mr. Stone is a very busy man," the secretary told him, resuming her seat behind the reception desk and turning her attention to her computer, clearly finished with them.  
  
"She's playing solitaire," Tony breathed in Steve's ear, as they stood up.  
  
"Don't do that," Steve whispered back. Tony's breath on his ear and the side of his neck was very distracting, and he didn't need to be distracted right now, or reminded that Tony could talk to computers in his head.  
  
Stone's office was a large, open room with floor to ceiling windows similar to the ones in the business sections of Stark Tower. The floor was polished wood, stained a deep mahogany red color. There were two matching paintings on the walls, both of them modernist abstracts of surpassing ugliness. The severe lines of the paintings were echoed in the furniture, except for Stone's desk, which was a massive Victorian thing made out of some dark wood.  It clashed with the floor.  
  
"Tony," Stone said, as they entered the room, "Mr. Rogers. Mr. Cage. Forgive me for not standing. To what do I owe this visit?"  
  
"You know perfectly well to what," Luke said. "You gonna stop spreading this anti-superhero hate stuff, or are we going to have to do something about it?"  
  
"Luke," Steve said.  
  
"Expressing concern over the damage caused by superhuman activities is hardly hate speech," Stone said. He rested his hands in front of him on the desk blotter, fingers steepled.   
  
"How about sponsoring people who say mutants are the Antichrist?" Luke asked, raising his eyebrows.  
  
"I'm sure Reverend Hathart has said nothing so offensive, and if anyone else has chosen to echo his sentiments in a more extreme manner, well, I certainly can't be held accountable, and neither can he."  
  
"Of course you can't," Tony said. "You're not that sloppy. Why are you doing this, Tiberius?"  
  
Everything Luke and Tony had just said or implied was true, but they  _had_  come here to attempt some sort of negotiation. "If you honestly have concerns about public safety, Mr. Stone," Steve said, "we'd be happy to discuss them with you. We would have been happy to discuss them on  _Dateline_  and  _60 Minutes_ , too, if anyone had approached us."  
  
"There's nothing to discuss, gentlemen," Stone said calmly, rolling his wheelchair out from behind the desk. He was smilingly slightly, lips curved faintly above the dark gold goatee. "My concerns are already being more than adequately addressed."  
  
"I'd like to think that these concerns aren't based on your past history with me," Tony said, looking Stone straight in the eye.   
  
Stone arched his eyebrows. "Now, why would our history together have any affect on my course of action? Not everything is about you, Tony. The collateral damage caused by your friends' fights is more than enough to merit any responsible citizen's concern."  
  
"The fallout from this campaign of yours is going to affect thousands of people, most of whom have done nothing to deserve public censure." Tony's voice was even, reasonable, the voice he used when he was talking to business partners or the press.  
  
"That would be deeply regrettable, but the safety of the general public ought to be the city's first concern." Stone gave them a small smile that would have been charming if Steve didn't know that at one point he'd tried to use his video games as a form of mind control.  
  
"Ty, please," Tony said, taking a half-step forwards and lowering his voice slightly. He didn't sound business-like anymore; he sounded like someone pleading with an old and dear friend. "I'm asking you as a friend. You know this isn't fair."  
  
The change in Stone was immediate, as if someone had flipped a switch. His slight smile widened to a broad grin, and he let out a short burst of laugher. "That's my naïve little Marc Antony, always trying to get people to play fair. Grow up, Tony. Life's not fair. Is it fair that you stuck me in this thing?" He waved a hand at his wheelchair, the grin vanishing as suddenly as it had appeared. "You took my legs away from me, and I'm going to take your precious superhero game away from you,  _Iron Man_."  
  
Of course Stone knew that Tony was Iron Man, and of course Tony hadn't thought to mention this. However, now that Stone himself had abandoned any pretence at diplomacy, Steve could speak plainly, and give free reign to his opinions.  
  
Tony spoke first. "This is between me and you, Ty," he said, staring at Stone with a strange intensity, "you know where I am and how to get to me; you don't need to drag other people into it."  
  
Stone laughed again. The sound was starting to grate on Steve's nerves.  
  
"But it's so easy. People are sheep, Tony." Stone was talking directly and solely to Tony now, as if he'd forgotten that Steve and Luke were in the room. "They believe anything the television and the newspapers tell them, and right now, they're being told that superhumans are  _dangerous_." He smirked, stressing the word. "That superhumans are _unnatural_. That people like you and your friends are a threat to their boring little middle-class lives. But go ahead. Speak out." Stone sneered at Steve, apparently remembering his presence again. "Stand up for yourselves." He turned to Luke, sneer deepening. "Represent."   
  
Stone returned his attention to Tony. "Maybe if you play your cards right with enough reporters and talk show hosts, you can even get one or two of them on your side. You could try taking Pat Zircher out for drinks," he added, naming channel two's smooth-voiced male anchorman. "You always did negotiate best on your back."   
  
His tone was casual, almost dismissive, so that it took a moment for Steve to realize exactly what Stone had just insinuated.   
  
Luke raised an eyebrow. "Are you implying what I think you're implying? Cause if so, you've got even less class than I thought."  
  
"Oh, I'm not implying anything," Stone assured him, a little smile playing over his lips. "I'm merely pointing out that Tony can be quite persuasive when he's on his knees." The expression he directed at Tony this time left no room for doubt about his meaning.  
  
Steve's vision went white around the edges; how dare Stone talk about Tony as if he were some sort of cheap whore who manipulated people with sex? Steve closed his eyes, clenching his jaw, but forcing his fists to uncurl. No matter how much he wanted to smash Stone's face in, to put the other man on the floor, preferably in a bleeding heap, decking him now wouldn't help anything. After a moment, Steve opened his eyes again, distantly both startled by the force of the emotion and appalled at himself.  
  
Stone couldn't possibly have slept with Tony. He didn't know what he was talking about. He was just attempting to use Tony's reputation as a womanizer against him.  
  
Still, the thought of Stone touching Tony like that -- touching Tony at all -- filled Steve with an entirely irrational rage.  
  
Steve kept himself still and silent by force of will, not trusting himself to speak. He wasn't sure what would have come out of his mouth.  
  
Luke stared at Stone for a second before turning to Tony. "Do you want me to hit him for you?"  
  
Tony ignored Luke. "I can see that there's nothing further for us to talk about," he said to Stone, voice even and face expressionless. "We'll see ourselves out." He was upset, Steve could tell, but hiding it well.  
  
The three of them left the office, not waiting for the secretary to see them out. Everyone was grimly silent as they rode the elevator down and left the building, to wait on the sidewalk outside for Happy Hogan to show up with Tony's car.  
  
"I'm sorry about this," Tony said, staring fixedly at the oncoming traffic. "I'm sorry my personal problems are spilling over onto everyone else. Tiberius-"  
  
Steve didn't want to hear about Tiberius. "I'll see you at the Tower," he said, then turned on his heel and started off down the street, heading for the nearest subway station.  
  
  
  
***  
  
  
  
Tony lay in bed, staring fixedly at the ceiling, waiting for his heartbeat to slow down. This was the sixth time in as many nights that he had woken from unsettling dreams. No, unsettling was putting it too mildly. They were dreams that made him wake up wanting a drink.  
  
This time, it had been the Air France flight exploding. He had no memory of the plane, only of watching those two men hit the ground afterwards, but in the dream, he had been able to see everything. The right wing shearing off, the cabin depressurizing, all of the passengers screaming, and then the entire plane going up in a massive ball of fire when his repulsor beams hit the fuel tanks.  
  
Last night, it had been Rumiko dying in his arms, and the night before that it had been Erwin Morley, crushed under fallen rubble when Obediah Stane had blown up their building in Silicon Valley. He was starting to sense a theme here. All of those deaths had been his fault.  
  
If his subconscious was trying to tell him that his friends were at risk due to Tiberius's vendetta against him, he already knew that, thanks.  
  
Tony propped himself up on one elbow to check the clock on his bedside table -- he could have checked the time through the Extremis, but right now, he didn't feel like accessing it. Three a.m. In three hours, he was going to have to get up, because if he wasn't in at Stark Enterprises by seven, something would inevitably go wrong.   
  
At this point, he knew, there was no way he would be able to get back to sleep.  
  
There had been over two hundred people on that airline flight. For all that Ty was clearly unbalanced, he had something of a point about the danger inherent in superheroes. Not necessarily about most other superheroes, but at least about him.   
  
With the armor, he was a living weapon, and he had been used as such more than once. Maybe Ty was right. Maybe he did need to be controlled.  
  
Or maybe the stress was just getting to him; it had happened before.  
  
He needed to talk to someone, get this sorted out in his head. Under normal circumstances, he would have gone to Steve, but he couldn't now. Not with this. Not after what had happened.  
  
What could you say to someone you'd almost killed? If the solution to stopping the hacker's access to the armor had occurred to him even moments later, Steve would have been just as dead as Rumiko.   
  
Tony had been accused of self-centeredness on more than one occasion, but he wasn't selfish enough to ask Steve for comfort over this. The guilt over what he and the armor had done under the hackers control was entirely his, and was nothing he hadn't earned.  
  
He was causing Steve -- and everyone else -- enough trouble as it was. Ty had stepped up the tenor and pace of his media attacks after their visit with him. Tony should have known better than to provoke him; Ty had as much as admitted that he'd only begun his anti-superhuman campaign in the first place in order to revenge himself on Tony.  
  
Ty was lashing out at him out of anger and fear, needed someone to blame for the damage to his nervous system that had left him crippled. Tony knew exactly how off balance being in a wheelchair, being helpless, left you.  
  
It didn't help that Ty hadn't been very stable to begin with. Whether he'd actually killed his parents or just convinced himself that he had, somewhere along the way, the kid Tony had gone to school with, the first person he'd ever kissed, had been replaced by someone who'd been warped by envy and bitterness.  
  
Ty hadn't been this... twisted, then. He'd been fifteen, two years older than Tony, and had been showing him what to do with girls; it had been innocent and probably sickeningly cute. Tony had done his best not to let what their friendship had turned into taint that memory.  
  
Steve wouldn't want to hear about that, either. He was angry enough about the situation with Tiberius as it as.  
  
It shouldn't have mattered so much when Ty had thrown their past relationship back in his face. It wouldn't have, at this point -- he'd had enough time to reconcile himself to Ty's betrayal -- save for the obvious disgust on Steve's face when Ty had brought it up.  
  
Steve had clearly taken Ty's reference to blow jobs as nothing more than a cheap insult; Tony didn't want to imagine his reaction if he knew that it were true, but he could, all too easily.  
  
For years, he'd entertained a secret fantasy that someday he'd finally work up the nerve to tell Steve how he really felt about him. And that Steve, against all odds, would not be upset or disturbed, but would instead admit that he felt the same way. Probably while blushing and staring at the floor. Steve was awful at those kinds of conversations.  
  
Of course, Steve had never given any indication that he was anything other than straight, and now it was obvious that he was appalled by the very idea that Tony might not be. He'd actually been offended on Tony's half at the mere suggestion.  
  
Even had Steve felt otherwise, he deserved much better than Tony. Better than someone with blood on his hands, someone who was damaged goods, someone whose first instinct any time something bad happened was to go crawl into a bottle. He was lucky that Steve was even still willing to be his friend, after all the times he'd proven himself spectacularly unworthy of that friendship over the years.  
  
He didn't need dreams of his past failures to remind him of that.  
  
  
  
***  
  
  
  
"So, how are you guys weathering all of the new media attention?" Jan asked, taking a sip of her coffee. "Personally, I'm glad Hank and I already decided to take a break from the superhero business for a couple of months."  
  
Steve shrugged. "It's nothing most of us haven't dealt with before. I think it's starting to get to Spiderman, though."  
  
Jan raised her eyebrows. "Really, Spiderman? I'd think he'd be used to that sort of thing by now."  
  
"This time is different," Steve said. He took a bite of his apple torte. The best part about Café Sabarsky was the deserts. The fact that it was inside the German and Austrian art museum was just an added perk.   
  
He and Jan were having an early lunch there, ostensibly so Jan could hear all about the New Avengers and Steve could hear all about England, but really because Steve needed someone to talk to about the situation with Tiberius Stone. Someone who wasn't Tony, who was already convinced that the whole thing was his fault, and didn't need to hear Steve whining about it. He'd extended the invitation to Hank, as well, but something had come up at the lab. Either way, it was nice to see Jan again.  
  
Café Sabarsky was only a few blocks away from where the Avengers Mansion had stood, and had been a regular haunt for many of the team members before the Mansion had been destroyed. Steve had been there enough times in costume that none of the staff looked at him twice anymore; today, though, he and Jan were both in street clothes. Right now wasn't a good time for superheroes to call attention to themselves.  
  
"Different from the time there were all the pickets outside the Mansion's gates with the ‘mutie go home' signs?"  
  
"There's no picketing yet," Steve admitted. "I'd just hoped that people were finally moving beyond that. I didn't realize how much resentment there still was out there for Stone to tap into."  
  
"People never quite manage to move beyond fearing what's different," Jan said. She stirred more milk into her coffee, which was already so diluted that it was a sort of khaki color. She never put sugar in it, though. She was the opposite of Bucky that way; he'd always drunk coffee black, but with enough sugar to make your teeth hurt. "I never expected that reverend guy to build up such a following in New York City, though, not this quickly. You'd think he'd be focused on the Bible Belt."  
  
"I'm sure he would be, left to his own devices, but Tiberius Stone is paying him off somehow." There wasn't any definitive evidence of that, at least, none that Tony had been able to locate while checking up on Hathart with the Extremis. Nonetheless, Steve would bet any amount of money you cared to name that it was true. Stone had had implied as much, in between announcing that he was going to drive superheroes out of business and bragging that he'd slept with Tony.  
  
"I really hate that man," Steve admitted. "You should have heard the things he said about Tony, when we tried to call him on what he's doing."  
  
"I can imagine," she said, picking up her coffee cup and cradling it in both hands. "Let me guess; he said that Tony's useless, pathetic, and just generally not as all-around brilliant as he is, and that he was no good in bed. Which is a lie, by the way. I can tell you from experience. And he probably threw in something slighting about the drinking, just for fun. Everyone does that."  
  
Steve choked on a bite of apple torte. "What?"  
  
"Don't tell me you haven't noticed it?" Jan sniffed cynically. "Every article about Tony written in the past six years has brought up the drinking."  
  
"No, no," Steve managed, still coughing, "the part about him and Stone. I thought that was just Stone being a jerk."  
  
Jan frowned. "Well, I don't know for sure." She took another sip of her coffee, then put the cup down, back on the silver tray it had come on. "But given Tony's thing for people who are bad for him, not to mention his thing for tall, blond men, I'm betting they used to be an item."  
  
Steve stared at her. He should probably contribute something to the conversation now, but he honestly couldn't think of anything to say. Tony... had slept with men. Apparently, with multiple men. Including Stone. At that thought, all of his desire to pound Stone into a bloody pulp returned. The fact that he and Tony had been lovers made the way that he had treated Tony throughout all of this -- throughout the entire time that Steve had known him -- that much worse.  
  
"Wait," Jan said, expression suddenly chagrined. "You did know that Tony's bisexual... right?"  
  
Steve shook his head silently.  
  
"Oh God," Jan groaned. "I really didn't want to be that person, the one that outs people." She lifted her gaze from her coffee cup to look Steve directly in the eye. "You don't have a problem with that, do you?"  
  
The brief burst of laughter that escaped him was probably slightly hysterical. "No. Trust me. I'm the last person who'd have a problem with that."  
  
"Good," Jan said, smiling slightly, "because I think it would just about kill Tony if you did." Her voice was light, but the stare she was leveling at him was serious.  
  
"I don't think my opinion is quite  _that_  important to Tony." Steve did his best to keep his tone as light as Jan's, hoping that none of the sudden bitterness he felt leaked through. Why had Tony never told him any of this? He was supposed to be one of Steve's closest friends, and yet he'd apparently had all kinds of relationships that he'd talked about with other people, but kept hidden from Steve.  
  
And, yes, it was probably hypocritical to be hurt, given that he'd never told anyone in this time that he was attracted to men, but he'd also never done anything about it, which made it different. He'd never found someone, and once he was Captain America, and busy defending the world from Hitler's plans for a Thousand Year Reiche, there had been far more important things to worry about. Steve hadn't told anyone because there was nothing to tell, since it was only a matter of his personal feelings, and therefore didn't affect anyone else.   
  
Of course, the fact that he'd assumed up until two minutes ago that Tony was straight had also had something to do with it. He'd been admiring Tony silently for years, and all this time Tony had been... probably completely uninterested in him, Steve realized, with an emotion he couldn't quite identify. Otherwise, he would have said something. It wasn't as if Tony was shy.  
  
Jan shrugged. "Maybe not, but your opinion's more important to him than anyone else's, and he's probably under enough stress right now as it is, so don't you dare say anything to make it worse."  
  
"I'd never do that!" Steve protested.  
  
Jan raised her eyebrows. "I'm sure you wouldn't mean to," she said. She took another sip of coffee. "I suppose we'll just have to wait for this to blow over, the way it always does. It can't happen soon enough for me. The showing for my Fall line was last week, and one of the models quit at the last minute because she disapproved of vigilante violence, and couldn't wear a dress made by a superhero."  
  
"I'm sorry." The New Avengers had set this whole thing in motion by giving Stone and Hathart, and a dozen other people, the fodder they needed. If they'd taken down the Wrecking Crew more quickly, there would have been less collateral damage, and that much less for Stone to exploit. It was particularly unfair that the fall out was spilling over onto Jan, and therefore probably Hank and other former Avengers as well, simply because they'd been his and Tony's teammates.  
  
Jan sniffed. "She was a bleached blonde bimbo with more plastic in her than Emma Frost. Anyway, her hips were too bony for the dress to drape properly. The show was better off without her."  
  
After that, the topic turned to Jan's new clothing designs, and what colors and fabrics she was using, and how Hank was faring at ESU. Steve listened, nodded in all the right places, and eventually found himself telling her all about finding out that Bucky wasn't actually dead.  
  
"But that's wonderful!" Jan said. "I know he was the closest thing you had to a little brother." There was a moment of silence while both of them stared at the table, neither mentioning Clint.  
  
"Yeah," Steve said. "It's wonderful." He left out the Russian assassin part. It was wonderful, and he didn't care what Bucky had been forced to do after the Soviets had found him. He was still Bucky. "How are things with you and Hank?"  
  
Jan smiled faintly. "Getting better. England was good, until the fire ant incident. I think having some time off has been good for him."  
  
"That's good," Steve said. He would be marking the days until it was the right time to ask them to rejoin the team. He'd heard this before, in almost exactly the same words, and both of them always got bored eventually. The Avengers wasn't the same without its core members, and while Thor, Clint, Wanda, and Pietro were gone, Jan and Hank were still there.  
  
By the time Steve paid the check and they both set out for home, it was early afternoon, and shadows were already starting to stretch across the street. He hadn't finished his apple torte; it just hadn't tasted as good anymore after Jan's revelation about Tony.  
  
Turning left out of Sabarsky's instead of right, to head for the subway, rather than the Mansion, still felt strange. The Avengers Mansion was always going to be home for Steve, regardless of where he actually lived.  
  
Stark Tower might be Tony's home now, but it wasn't the same.  
  
Tony. Had slept with Tiberius Stone.   
  
Tiberius Stone had had his smarmy, sociopathic paws all over Tony. He'd done things with Tony, to Tony, that Steve had wanted to do for years. Somehow, this seemed monstrously unfair; Stone didn't care about Tony, had never cared about Tony, and yet he was the one Tony had wanted, not Steve.  
  
He'd been angry at the thought initially -- Tiberius Stone didn't deserve Tony -- but now that he'd had time to adjust to the idea, he was mostly just tired. Tired, and almost empty, as if the anger and jealousy had left hollow places when they had drained away.  
  
Steve stuffed his hands in his pockets, glaring at the cracks in the pavement. It was silly to feel this hurt. Lots of attractive people weren't interested in him, and he'd never felt hurt by that before. After all, Sam was one of his best friends, too, and every bit as attractive as Tony, and if Steve were to discover tomorrow that Sam liked men, but not Steve specifically, he wouldn't want to crawl into a hole and hide, or possibly punch things.  
  
For all the years he had known Tony, Steve had never had never let himself seriously consider the possibility of anything between them because he'd always assumed that Tony was straight. Somehow, knowing that there could have been something between them after all made Steve that much more aware of what he was missing.  
  
This was idiotic, Steve decided. Why did he have to love Tony when it had just become painfully obvious that Tony had no interest in him as anything other than a friend?  
  
Love Tony... He was in love with his best friend, who wasn't in love with him. Perfect.  
  
Steve kicked viciously at a stray piece of paper as he entered the subway station. The paper flipped over, revealing an advertisement for a religious revival led by Reverend Hathart, to be held in Madison Square Gardens next week.  
  
There were moments when Steve almost wished that they had left him in the ice.  
  
  
  
***


	3. Chapter 3

Arnold Hathart was being interviewed on Dateline, blathering on about superheroes and vigilantism and mutants being unnatural and blah, blah, blah. Why hadn't anyone gotten up to change the channel yet, Peter wondered plaintively. He'd expected Tony to make some kind of scathing remark and change the channel with his brain at least five minutes ago.  
  
Instead, Tony was staring off into space with this kind of zombie-look. He'd been doing that a lot for the last couple of days. Either all of this was really starting to get to him, or he was designing something incredibly complicated in his head.  
  
"You know," Peter commented, "you'd think at least one of these reporters would have read the Bible, because I'm pretty sure none of the stuff he's quoting is actually in it."  
  
"You've never read the Bible verse about superpowers being temptations put in man's path by Satan?" MJ asked, raising her eyebrows in mock surprise. "It's in Leviticus, right after the part that forbids you to eat shrimp or wear cotton-poly blends."  
  
The two of them were sitting together on the small couch, the one that was usually reserved for Cap and Tony, who had both opted to take the armchairs this evening. The small couch had the best view of the television, which explained why the New Avengers' leaders had staked it out as theirs, despite the fact that it was about three feet shorter than the other couch, and required you to sit right next to the person you were sharing it with; if you were sharing it with Luke or Cap, it turned into a loveseat. Peter didn't mind; it gave him an excuse to put an arm around MJ's shoulders.  
  
He wrinkled his nose. "I never read that part. It was boring." He'd almost gotten kicked out of the Sunday school class Aunt May had made him go to as a kid for daydreaming during class and asking the teacher too many questions ("When did God create the dinosaurs? And the trilobites? And the wooly mammoths? Was it all on the same day? Because the lady at the museum said it was millions of years apart. Is a day for God longer than a normal day?"). On the slim chance that he ever needed information from the Bible, Peter figured he could always just ask Matt Murdock, who was Catholic and therefore had probably been taught by nuns or something.  
  
"Why do people listen to him?" Peter went on, waving a hand at the television. He directed the question to the room at large, not really expecting an answer. Sure enough, none was forthcoming.  
  
MJ shrugged; Peter could feel her shoulders move up and down slightly against his arm.   
  
He turned to Tony. "Hey, any idea why people are actually listening to this guy?"  
  
Tony didn't answer, still staring off into space with a slight frown drawing a line between his eyebrows.   
  
"I mean," Peter tried again, "respectable news station-type people instead of angry-mob type people?"  
  
Tony continued to ignore him, and Peter was contemplating tossing a piece of webbing at him to get his attention when Cap spoke up.  
  
"Something about him is familiar," he said softly, staring at the tv screen, where Hathart was trading platitudes with a Dateline interviewer.  
  
MJ snorted. "Of course it is. He's been on every radio show and talk show for the past month. You can't escape him. Believe me, I've tried."  
  
Cap shook his head, still frowning at the screen. "No, the way he talks, those gestures, the way all those people start nodding along with him. I've seen that before, and not from someone giving a sermon, either."  
  
"In an infomercial selling Bibles for nine ninety-five?" Peter suggested cheerfully. MJ was the only one who even smiled. No one appreciated him.  
  
There was a sharp trill of sound as the cordless phone sitting on the end table rang. Cap stood up and crossed the room in two strides, scooping the phone up from its spot at Tony's elbow and answering it on the second ring. "Avengers Tower." He turned to Tony, holding a hand over the receiver, and said in a loud whisper, "How do you turn off the speakerphone? This thing has too many buttons."  
  
Tony half-turned, looking up at him and blinking. Before he could answer, a depressingly familiar voice barked,  
  
"One of you people get me Captain America, or whoever your leader is this week."  
  
Jameson. Oh God, what did he want? Peter waved his hands in a desperate negative motion, mouthing, "Don't tell him I'm here."  
  
"Speaking," Cap said dryly.  
  
"Right," J. Jonah Jameson snapped, speaking to Cap in the same peremptory bark he used on the Bugle staff, "I have something useful for you people to do. I've been looking into this crusade of Stone's, put one of my best people on it, and the whole thing stinks like roadkill in July."  
  
"One of Jameson's best people" probably meant Ben Urich, which meant Jameson was actually concerned about this. Ben usually covered front page news, so if J.J. had put him on this anti-superhuman thing... Jameson loathed superheroes more than the entire criminal population of the Raft put together, so it followed that Tiberius Stone's news magazines were cutting into the  _Bugle'_ s circulation.  
  
"Don't get me wrong, I agree that people like you are dangerous; I've been saying it for years," Jameson went on, "but I don't approve of pretty boys like Stone using the media to advance their own private crusades."  
  
Peter snorted at this blatant hypocrisy, but Jameson was on a roll now, speaking too quickly for anyone to interrupt. Cap was holding the phone a good foot away from his ear, wincing at each particularly loud shout.  
  
"He's sullying the good name of the profession, using all those magazines and news stations he owns as his private mouthpiece. None of them have touched anything else for the past week, not even the war in Iraq or the city elections. I run hard-hitting journalism about who's taking bribes this month, and everyone ignores it to read Stone's rags, where this Reverend guy is spouting pseudo-religious hoo-ha."  
  
"And what would you like us to do about this, Mr. Jameson?" Cap asked dryly.  
  
Jameson continued as if he hadn't spoken. "You see people like him on late-night tv with Tammy Fay Baker, selling Bibles for nine-ninety-five. They don't make it onto  _60 Minutes_  and  _Dateline_. I want to know how the hell this crackpot is getting onto reputable news outlets instead of staying on AM radio and public access cable where he belongs. So I did some looking, and I found not one record of this guy that goes back further than two months. He came out of nowhere. He's never even paid federal income tax."  
  
Tony looked up at Cap, eyebrows raised. "No wonder I couldn't find anything on him."  
  
"Wow," Peter said, forgetting to stay quiet so that Jameson couldn't hear him. "If even the IRS can't get him, he must be a supervillain."  
  
"Or in the mob," MJ offered.  
  
"You think he's using a false identity?" Cap asked Jameson.  
  
"I know he is. And I think you people should look into it. It's not my problem; it's your problem. It's your business to make sure these rumormongers stop discrediting legitimate journalism." There was a loud click as he hung up, then the hollow silence of an empty line. Peter wasn't sure how Jameson managed to push a button loudly; it was a special talent.  
  
"Ha!" he snorted. "Legitimate journalism. He wouldn't know legitimate journalism if it danced naked in front of him waving a sign."  
  
"My God," Cap said. He was still holding the phone, staring off into the distance much the way Tony had been earlier. "Rumormonger," he repeated, shaking his head. "The Hate-Monger.  _That's_  who he reminds me of. I didn't make the connection without the damn Klan mask, but that's it." He tossed the phone onto the end table so hard that it went skidding across it and fell off onto the floor with a clatter. "Stone's DreamVision was essentially a mind-control device, right? The Hate-Monger used mind control, too, and he stirred people up just like this."  
  
Tony looked up, shoulders going tense. "Are you sure? I thought he turned into energy and dissolved."  
  
"Wait," Peter interrupted, "the guy in the purple Klan costume? Yeah, I thought he was dead."  
  
"He is," Cap said grimly. "But before he was brought back by the Cosmic Cube and turned into energy, he had a machine that influenced people's minds. Arnim Zola built the original model, but if Zola could build it, I'd bet that Stone could duplicate it; he's already worked on mind-control technology. If I'm right, he could make this escalate from picketers and sermons to anti-mutant riots and lynchings very quickly. That's how the original Hate-Monger worked."  
  
"Great," Tony muttered. "So now people can be lynched because Tiberius is holding a grudge against me." He shook his head, running one hand through his hair, then turned to Cap. "Sorry. How do you want to handle this?" He sighed, shoulders slumping. "There's nothing on Hathart, and Tiberius has been milking the fact that he's a harmless philanthropist in a wheelchair for all it's worth. If we go after him and accuse him of being a terrorist with some kind of hate machine, we'll be playing right into his hands."  
  
He had a point. If even Jameson couldn't find any dirt on this "Reverend," there wasn't anything to find. "Um," Peter raised his hand, speaking up hesitantly, "are you guys sure you're not just jumping to conclusions here?"  
  
Tony turned back to the television screen, tilting his head to the side slightly. "You know, now that I look at it, that purple tie Hathart wears to all of these interviews is a repeating pattern that consists entirely of the letter H over and over."  
  
"That could be a coincidence," Peter pointed out. "Because his name starts with an H. It's not like you need a Hate Ray to be a creepy religious fundamentalist and get other people to agree with you."  
  
"It may be nothing but a coincidence," Cap said, "but I don't think we can take that chance."  
  
"Hey," MJ interrupted, "Isn't he holding some kind of revival thing in Madison Square Gardens this Tuesday?"  
  
Cap nodded. "I saw the flyers for it. We can go incognito -- except you, Peter, I want you waiting in the rafters in case I'm right. If I'm completely off base and Hathart is just spouting rhetoric and nothing else, we'll leave quietly. If not..." he turned to Tony, "if there was some form of technological mind control being used, could you detect it?"  
  
Tony nodded, offering Cap a half-hearted-looking smile. "It's a good thing I have the Extremis now. Otherwise, I'd have to actually be in the armor to do it, and that would rule out any hope of subtlety. I can use the Extremis to scan for any kind of anomalous energy signal being broadcast, and analyze it against the Controller's beams and the old Hate Ray. We'll want to get there early and stay to the rear of the crowd."  
  
"We can station Luke and Logan by the doors," Cap said. "Just in case things turn nasty, and we need to get the crowd out quickly. You, Jessica, and I can blend in with the crowd."  
  
"Ooh," MJ sat up straighter, "can I come? I've always wanted to go undercover." She grinned impishly at Peter. "I can be your browbeaten little woman."  
  
"Only if you don't wear make-up," Peter told her solemnly. "God doesn't approve of make-up."  
  
She arched her eyebrows. "Who said I wore make-up?"  
  
"Your eyebrows are red and your eyelashes are black."  
  
MJ set one hand against Peter's shoulder and shoved him. "I'm a red-headed actress. Mascara is a necessity. It's a hazard of being redheaded or blonde; look at Cap, he's got no eyelashes at all."  
  
Cap blinked. His eyelashes were, in fact, very blond, Peter realized. It wasn't normally the sort of thing Peter paid any attention to. "Daredevil doesn't have eyelashes, either," Peter volunteered. Though he wasn't sure if that was because Matt's eyelashes were light enough to be invisible, or if they'd been burned off when he was blinded.  
  
"Why are we talking about my eyelashes?" Cap asked, looking slightly confused. "You can come," he told MJ, "but you may need to leave very quickly if things go badly, and you should stay by one of us, just in case."  
  
"Fine by me," MJ said, shrugging. "Getting attacked by an angry mob isn't high on my list of things to do before I'm thirty."  
  
  
  
***  
  
  
  
If he brought the armor with him, then even with it in the briefcase, he could still access the armor through the Extremis and use its external sensors to scan for any energy signals. Tony frowned absently as he strode across Stark Enterprises' lobby, trying to decide which of a dozen filtering processes would be mostly likely to isolate a Hate-Ray or Hate-Ray equivalent's energy transmissions.  
  
He probably ought to be concentrating on the board meeting he was about to walk into, but this was more interesting. It also beat thinking about everything else; he was so tired, tired of nightmares, tired of worrying about what Tiberius would try next, worn down by the guilt that had been eating at him ever since he'd come to after the destruction of the airline flight and realized what he'd done. He wanted so badly to just spill everything to Steve; under other circumstances, Tony could have told him everything and Steve, in that way he had of always seeing the positive in something, would have been able to make things seem less dire.  
  
But things with Steve were... they couldn't talk to each other right now, not after what Tony had done and what Tiberius had said. Not unless they were fighting something or planning a fight. Steve kept giving him these looks, considering, oddly hurt looks.  
  
He had been openly appalled at Ty's revelation of their past together, and just as obviously disbelieving. Tony suspected he was starting to re-evaluate that conclusion, though, given the way Steve had conspicuously avoided spending any time alone with him since then.  
  
Steve was one of the most accepting and open-minded people Tony knew, but he did come from an earlier time, even if it was easy to forget that most of the time, and everyone had their limits.  
  
Tony pressed the button for the elevator, and watched the lights over the doors move as the car descended. A dark, waivery reflection formed in the polished brass doors as someone came up behind him. As he watched, the blurry shape resolved into a tall, stocky bald man with a dark mustache.   
  
Tony spun around, to find the lobby almost entirely empty, save for the security guard still sitting at his station by the door. No bald men, Russian or otherwise.  
  
It must have been a trick of the light. For a second, the indistinct image in the door had looked like Vanko, the original Crimson Dynamo.   
  
The dreams were obviously starting to get to him. Vanko's death had featured prominently in last night's batch, the Russian scientist throwing himself in front of Tony and taking the energy blast meant for him, while Tony had stood motionless, frozen, unable to do anything.   
  
He hadn't thought about Vanko in years. He'd convinced the other man to defect, to betray his country; they wouldn't have come after him if only Tony had left well enough alone.  
  
The elevator chimed softly. When Tony turned to face it, the reflection, whatever it had actually been, had vanished.  
  
The afternoon did not improve from there.   
  
"SE stock has dropped four points since this superhero debacle started," Layton announced, frowning portentously. He always looked like a frog when he did that, Tony reflected. "Thanks to your employment of Iron Man and the fact that you fund the Avengers, people associate SE and our products with superheroes."  
  
Ms. Grant nodded, tapping a sheaf of papers with one fingernail. "And now that people have begun calling for government legislation to deal with superhuman powers, you can be sure that public opinion will sour even further. It may be time to consider disassociating ourselves from the whole business, before our shareholders begin to suffer for it."  
  
Considering that Grant and Layton owned approximately a third of the Stark Enterprises shares (not counting the fifty-one percent of stock which Tony owned himself), he strongly suspected that their concern for the shareholders extended mostly to their own pockets.  
  
"What do you suggest we do?" Tony asked.  
  
Grant leaned forward, arching an eyebrow. "Fire Iron Man. You know the company has never been entirely comfortable with him. People would see it as a sign of good faith."  
  
"And cut the funding to the New Avengers; they no longer have government sanction, and their presence in our building does nothing for stockholder confidence." Layton stabbed a pudgy finger in Tony's direction, frown deepening.  
  
It went on in that vein for several minutes. It was nothing Tony hadn't heard before, so he composed his face into an expression that hopefully conveyed bland interest and stared over the board members' heads at the conference room's floor to ceiling windows.  
  
It was a dim, cloudy day, the late October weather just starting to turn cold, and the conference table and assembled board members were reflected faintly in the polarized glass, their shapes ghostly against the slightly wavery skyline.  
  
Tony occupied himself by located each of the board's reflection. Layton, the round glasses and bad haircut distinctive. Canete, the dark grey of his suit and bright green and yellow of his tie standing out even in the washed-out reflection. Grant, her dark blonde hair swept up in a severe bun. Tony had always thought she looked like a school marm in Armani. Very briefly, when he'd first become head of the company, he'd entertained thoughts of getting her out of the Armani and her hair down out of that bun. At that point, she'd seemed like an alluringly sophisticated older woman; in reality, she'd probably only been in her thirties, close to the age he was now.  
  
He had been a very stupid twenty-two year old. Her contempt for him, at least, had been earned.  
  
It took Tony a moment to place the dark-haired young woman sitting next to her; there were no women with black hair on the board -- no men with hair that dark, either.  
  
Rumiko turned her head slightly, meeting Tony's eyes in the glass, and smiled a familiar, flirtatious smile. The one she'd always given him when they were trapped at dull social functions and she wanted him to drag her into an out of the way corner and make things more interesting.  
  
Tony froze, staring at her, unable to process anything else. It took a Herculean effort to keep his expression under control, to keep the rest of the room from realizing that anything was wrong. He was still distantly aware of the board talking, knew he couldn't visibly react.  
  
He blinked, hard, and she was gone.  
  
Everyone at the table was staring at him.  
  
"So, we're agreed then? Mr. Stark?" Canete said, with the sound a man repeating himself, possibly not for the first time. "You'll terminate your contract with Iron Man?"  
  
"I'm not firing Iron Man," Tony said flatly. "And I'm certainly not cutting off my funding of the Avengers -- which comes from my own pocket and not company finances. Do we have any actual business to talk about? How about the satellite phone? You people like the satellite phone."  
  
Predictably, things only went downhill from there.  
  
Several hostile minutes later, Tony finally escaped the conference room. He had no idea what he'd said to them after the crack about the phone; no idea what anyone had said. It must have been acceptable, though, because no one followed him down the hall. It was a good thing he had experience navigating business meetings while in less-than-optimal shape.  
  
He couldn't afford to go crazy right now. Couldn't afford to be compromised again.  
  
People had died last time. Steve had nearly died. Rumiko had died. It hadn't been him, but it had still been his fault.  
  
She had been so real. He'd half-expected to turn and find her sitting at the conference table beside Grant, yawning and tapping her watch, waiting impatiently for him to take her out to some expensive restaurant, or a trendy club she would then decide to leave in an hour, once she remembered that Tony hated them.  
  
She was dead, just like Vanko was dead. What was wrong with him? Why was this happening?  
  
He'd dreamt of Rumiko before, dreamt of Vanko, too. And Yin Sen, and Ayisha, and Erwin and Clytemnestra Morley, and all of the other people whose deaths he was responsible for. He'd never seen them when he was awake, though.  
  
Tony hurried past Pepper's desk, not looking at her, and into his office, shutting the door behind him. He collapsed into the desk chair, resting his elbows on the desk and letting his head drop into his hands.  
  
He couldn't go insane. He couldn't. What was he going to do?  
  
Maybe he was letting himself panic over nothing, Tony reasoned, squeezing his eyes shut and rubbing at his eyelids until flashes of color started appearing in the darkness. Maybe he just needed a night of uninterrupted sleep.  
  
Maybe... last time this had happened, last time he'd started seeing things, he'd been under Kang's influence, forced to hurt his friends yet again. People had died -- people always died; for him, or because of him -- and the team had understandably wanted nothing to do with him. Then Onslaught had come, though he didn't remember that part. He remembered the last big fight, however, and apologizing to Steve, and the strange alternate dimension Reed Richard's kid had sent them too.  
  
He remembered it, even if no one else did. People had died for him there, too. Raider, blown up and tortured, and all because he'd been Tony's friend, because Tony's subconscious had created him to fill the void that was supposed to filled by Steve and Rhodey -- and Tiberius.  
  
If the others knew, they would insist that he leave the team. He should; should tell Steve, should take himself off the Avengers' roster. It was the responsible thing to do. The safe thing to do.  
  
He had nowhere else to go. If the Avengers threw him out, he would have no one. Pepper and Happy would leave, too, to be safe, and Steve... Steve would be disappointed in him. He couldn't disappoint Steve. Not again.  
  
He needed air. The balcony was a good place for that.   
  
Tony opened his eyes and stood, turning -- and then he halted, one hand on the back of his desk chair.  
  
Raider grinned at him from the window, his reflection standing on the other side of Tony's desk, hands in his pockets. It was the same casual pose he'd often assumed when waiting for Tony to finish some bit of business or lab work.  
  
It took everything Tony had to turn around. Raider was  _not_  actually there,  _not_  standing three feet away about to tease Tony for overworking himself again, because Raider  _didn't exist_.  
  
When he finally forced himself to look, the office was empty, as he'd known it would be.  
  
Tony sagged back into his chair, covering his eyes with his hands once more. This wasn't real. None of it was real. He would get a good night's sleep, and in the morning, all of this would be gone.  
  
And he wasn't going to drink himself to sleep, either, even if that would have stopped the nightmares.  
  
Oh God, Tony thought again. What am I going to do?  
  
  
  
***  
  
  
  
"Are you getting anything?" Steve asked.  
  
He and Tony were standing near one of the left side exits of the Madison Square Gardens arena, Tony in plainclothes with briefcase in hand and Steve maskless, with his costume concealed under a trench coat, listening to Reverend Albert Hathart warm up the crowd.  
  
He had just begun his opening remarks, and already, Steve's dislike of the man had doubled. Somehow, seeing him in person made him seem even more petty and irritating.  
  
Tony shook his head. "Sorry." He offered Steve a small smile that looked oddly strained. "You'd think I could at least do that much, huh?" He shifted the briefcase to his other hand, continuing, "Nothing yet, but he's just gotten started; I'm going to need more time to take readings. He'll probably raise the intensity as he goes along, anyway. Give me a few more minutes before we get out of here."  
  
Tony looked tired, worn around the edges. Steve briefly wondered if things were going badly at Stark Enterprises again, the way they had last time Stone had started playing games. If there was one thing Tony never doubted, it was his engineering ability.  
  
"If there's anything to find, you'll find it," Steve said. Even if Tony had no romantic interest in him, he was still one of Steve's closest friends.   
  
Steve scanned the crowd, a surprisingly diverse mass who filled the arena to nearly three-quarters capacity. Reverend Hathart, if he was using the Hate-Monger's technology, clearly practiced a different brand of small-minded hatred than his predecessor; the crowd was not exclusively white, blond, and blue-eyed. Most disturbing of all were the children and teenagers scattered throughout the crowd.   
  
If a riot actually did break out, getting the children out would have to be their first priority.  
  
There weren't enough New Avengers to cover every exit, so they had tried to space themselves evenly around the perimeter of the room, staying as far from the stage as possible to put themselves on the outside radius of any prospective mind control devices.  
  
Steve scanned the visible exits, easily picking out Luke, who towered head and shoulders above the people around him. Steve could also make out Jessica Drew by the far right wall, and Jessica Jones, across the arena from Luke. He found MJ by her flamingly red hair, and knew that Peter would be in the rafters directly above her. He couldn't see Logan, who was too short to stand out in a crowd, but he was supposed to be by the main exit. Hopefully, he was in position.  
  
No one was sure how Hathart had managed to book Madison Square Gardens on such short notice. He'd even managed to boot an early-season basketball game out of the arena. Predictably, despite extensive searching on Tony's part, he hadn't been able to find any connection to Tiberius Stone.  
  
"For by their deeds you shall know them," Harthart proclaim, in ringing tones. "By their deeds and nothing else, it seems. Why do they walk about in masks, hiding their identities? Honest men have no need to hide their faces from their neighbors."  
  
People like this always harped on the masks, as if the very notion of hiding your identity when you took on someone like the Green Goblin or the Kingpin was shocking and done with sinister intent in mind. And yet heads all around the arena were nodding, and there were even a few scattered cheers.  
  
All these people seemed to have completely forgotten that there were any number of heroes who didn't wear mask -- from Luke Cage to the Fantastic Four -- and numerous others who did, but didn't have a secret identity. Steve himself didn't. Hank and Jan didn't. Carol, Simon, most of the X-Men.  
  
"They hide walk among us, unseen, unnoticed, spreading their plague, wielding powers God never intended mankind to possess. The Bible tells us, he who does what is sinful is of the devil. And no one who is born of God will continue to sin. Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God!"  
  
Oh, come on, Steve thought. Why stop there? Why not read the next line, "and neither is anyone who does not love his brother." He hated people like this. People who took the Bible and warped it to justify their own twisted prejudices.   
  
"...seducing our children into unnatural practices..."  
  
"Oh, screw that," MJ's voice muttered through the commlink. "I'm the one who seduced Peter. Wait, is this thing on?"  
  
There was a moment of crackling silence, then, "What unnatural practices are the two of you getting up to?" Luke asked.  
  
"I'm going to die now, okay?" Peter's voice said, plaintively.  
  
"If we do nothing, our children will grow up idolizing these deviants, admiring violent vigilantes and criminals and believing that these behaviors are not only acceptable, but laudable."  
  
And now he was exhorting people to "think of the children." And even if Steve himself hadn't been what was considered bisexual by this era's standards, he would still have been able to pick up on the blatant subtext underlying all of Hathart's accusation of "unnatural practices." Steve clenched his hands into fists, glowering at the podium. People like Hathart were everything that was wrong with America. Nasty, petty, small-minded bigots who--  
  
Was that Logan growling through the commlink?  
  
Admittedly, not an unexpected response from Logan given the rhetoric being spouted, but going by the intensity of his own reaction, Steve was willing to bet that, yes, Hathart had a hate-ray.  
  
"I'm picking up an energy signature now," Tony said, "and scans confirm that it's consistent with the Hate-Monger's." He was staring at the stage, wearing the blank expression that he occasionally got when accessing the Extremis. Steve didn't like how distant it made him look.  
  
He still wasn't sure how he felt about the Extremis. It had saved Tony's life, but was also what had allowed that insane hacker to use Tony -- and through him, his armor -- as a weapon so effectively. And Tony had been... different, since acquiring it. Distant. Steve wasn't sure what all of these new powers might be doing to him.  
  
"And I ask what I know we must all be asking: how can any of us be safe with people who are capable of these things running around uncontrolled, unidentified."  
  
There was a loud cheer, and Hathart raised his arms to signal for silence. "People who can level buildings, cause explosions, influence our thoughts and feelings. Some of them can barely even be counted as human. For the good of society, for their own good, these people need to be contained, controlled."  
  
"You mean, like they did in Genosha and Madripoor?" Logan shouted, his voice carrying across the arena with unfortunate clarity.  
  
Steve exchanged glances with Tony, seeing his own sudden wince reflected in Tony's face. "You're the one who insisted we needed him," he said.  
  
"Hawkeye would have said something worse," Tony pointed out, softly. "And you can't tell me you weren't about to accuse him of being a Nazi."  
  
"Not in those exact words," Steve hedged, suddenly feeling slightly defensive -- but still angry, underneath that. Knowing that a Hate-Ray was being used didn't isolate you from its effects.  
  
Reverend Hathart swung about to face the section of the crowd Logan's shout had come from, smiling benevolently in a way that made Steve want to knock his teeth out. "Nothing so extreme as that. The Genoshans had laudable intentions at the outset, but they took things too far. The incident at Madripoor was a terrible tragedy, and proof of just how sorely legislation to control superhumans is needed, so that that kind of disaster doesn't occur here."  
  
"Oh, blame the victims," MJ snarled through the commlink. "Pompous hypocritical jackass."  
  
"Sing it, sister," Jessica Jones muttered.   
  
"Tragedy, hell!" an unidentified voice said loudly somewhere to Steve's right. "It was genocide!"  
  
'The freaks got what was coming to them," a mid-forties woman in a navy blue business suit snapped.  
  
"Yeah?" the first voice repeated, and Steve could pinpoint its owner now, a young man in faded blue jeans and a t-shirt from some band Steve couldn't identify. He stepped forward, jaw set, invading the woman's personal space. "And I suppose the Holocaust victims got what was coming to them, too."  
  
"Don't call her a Nazi, you little punk." The man who'd been sitting next to the woman in the blue suit stepped forward and shoved the young man backwards, sending him staggering into another spectator.  
  
Given the rising noise of the crowd, this sort of confrontation must be happening all over the arena. Steve caught Tony's arm. "How quickly can you shut Hathart's device down?"   
  
Tony frowned. "It's not digital. It's older technology, transistors or maybe even vacuum tubes. All it does is broadcast a sustained signal on a specific frequency."  
  
"Like an evil radio," Peter observed, via the commlink.  
  
"I can't hack it," Tony went on. "We have to either get up close and overload its circuits or take it out physically."  
  
Steve nodded. "How big a distraction do you need?"  
  
"Something big enough to let me get onto the stage."  
  
One of the nearby spectators threw a punch, fist catching another man on the jaw. Behind his podium, Hathart was making no move to halt the increasing chaos, watching the crowd and smiling.  
  
"Leave that to me," Steve said grimly. He might as well take a page from Logan's book; it would be extremely satisfying, if nothing else. He locked eyes with Tony, who nodded slightly, and then he stepped forward, pulling on his mask and pushing his way through the crowd until he could be seen from the stage.   
  
Behind him, Tony was speaking to the others, his voice coming to Steve only through the commlink now that the crowd had blocked him from earshot. "Cap's going to out the good Reverend. Be ready for the reaction, and make sure he can't run."  
  
"You know, we really need to start planning these things," Spiderwoman observed. "Or at least following what little plan we have."  
  
"You're enjoying this, aren't you, Hathart!" Steve yelled. He could make his voice carry when he needed to, and heads turned all over the arena. With the trench coat shrugged off and tossed aside, he would be very visible. "Why don't you tell everyone what you're really doing?"  
  
Hathart's head snapped around, and his eyes widened as he saw Steve. He recovered quickly, though, Steve would give him that.  
  
Hathart threw up one arm to point dramatically in Steve's direction, thundering, "We will not be silenced by intimidation! Take your masks and your bullying tactics and leave!"  
  
"You accuse superheroes of manipulating people's minds," Steve went on, overriding him. "Of using their powers to corrupt people. Why don't you tell them what you've been doing with the Hate-Monger's little toy? Or is mind-control not a sin when you're doing it?"  
  
"I am controlling no one," Hathart proclaimed, stepping away from the podium and holding out his hands. "Merely inspiring them to righteous wrath. Sometimes the only way to fight the devil is with his own tools!" He turned away from Steve addressing the entire crowd once more. "You have all come to have the fire of conviction kindled within you. Search your hearts, and deal with this sinner as God leads you to!"  
  
The noise of the crowd surged as people around Steve turned on him, snarling and shouting. Steve ducked backwards, out of the way of a punch, only to see another spectator shove the man who'd attempted to hit him. Then everyone was yelling and hitting each other, the audience having reached the flashpoint where people ceased to be a crowd and became a mob.  
  
This was not good. People were going to get hurt. They were supposed to be preventing this. "Luke," Steve barked into the commlink, "Wolverine, Spiderman, start getting people out of here, starting with the children. Spiderwomen, make sure he doesn't leave."  
  
Out of the corner of his eye, Steve saw a tall, red-headed man drawing his arm back to cold-cock the shorter, darker-skinned woman across the aisle from him.   
  
Steve turned, and caught the man's fist in mid-swing. "Don't," he said, tightening his grip warningly.  
  
The man deflated instantly.  
  
Below him, Tony had pushed his way onto the stage, and Steve saw him call the armor in a sudden whirlwind of red and gold.  
  
A man in a business suit went flying onto the stage, slamming into the podium and knocking it over to reveal a large, boxy electronic device nearly two feet square.  
  
"That was convenient," Tony's voice observed. He lifted the unconscious man up and handed him off to Spiderwoman, who had materialized out of the crowd at his elbow, street clothes replaced by red and yellow spandex.  
  
Hathart, who had already jumped back from the edge of the stage when the man had landed, took one look at them and turned to flee into the crowd.  
  
He wasn't going anywhere, not if Steve had anything to say about it.  
  
Steve was on the arena floor, about fifteen feet away from the stage the stage. He shook his arm lose from someone's grasp, barely feeling the punch that landed in his ribs when as he did so, shoved his way through the crowd, and then grabbed a corner of the stage and vaulted up onto it, landing in a crouch in front of Hathart. He didn't have his shield -- they hadn't expected this to end in a riot, hadn't wanted to escalate thing by bringing weapons if it had -- but he didn't need it for this.  
  
"Going somewhere?" Steve said, grabbing Hathart by the front of his shirt and getting a fist full of ugly purple tie. Harthart kicked ineffectually at his right shin, and Steve threw a hard right jab at his jaw.  
  
It felt wonderful. Harthart sagged, Steve grinned, and then, over Hathart's shoulder, he saw Tony step drop to one knee and lay a hand against the front of the hate-ray.  
  
The explosion was deafening.  
  
There was a moment of silence, as everyone turned to stare at the smoking remains of the hate-ray. Tony was on the floor ext to it, knocked flat by the force of the explosion, not moving.  
  
The smoke alarm went off, someone screamed, and suddenly, everyone was shoving for the exits.  
  
Peter dropped down from the rafters, landing next to him. "That wasn't part of the plan, was it?" he asked. "because I don't remember any explosions in the plan."  
  
Steve thrust Hathart toward him and took off for where Tony was still lying like a broken toy, not answering.  
  
As Steve reached him, Tony sat up, swayed, putting one gauntleted hand against the side of his helmet. Steve felt a vast wave of relief sweep through him, leaving him almost weak-kneed for a second. It was instantly replaced by a deep desire to shake Tony until he rattled.  
  
"What the hell were you thinking?" he snapped, yanking Tony to his feet. "This place is packed. That explosion could have hurt people." Tony had been standing right next to it. If he hadn't been in the armor, it could have killed him.  
  
"I directed the force of the blast away from the crowd," Tony said flatly. "It was turning into a riot; we needed to get the hate-ray offline right away."  
  
Which didn't explain why he'd felt the need to blow it up from less than a foot away. "We'll talk about this later," Steve said.  
  
Hathart was webbed securely to the stage, and Peter was now up in the rows of seats that had been closest to the explosion, getting people down. MJ and Jessica Jones were helping to corral people out the doors, mostly by pushing at them and yelling. The crowd was still shoving and shouting, but there was clear space by the main exit, where Luke, and, presumably, Logan, had convinced or threatened people into leaving in an orderly single file.  
  
Jessica Drew was reentering the auditorium via the exit Steve and Tony had been by earlier, several security personnel in tow.   
  
The confrontation was over, Steve judged. Now it was time for the cleanup, which he suspected was going to be harder.  
  
  
***


	4. Chapter 4

"For future reference," Luke said, as the group walked down the hallway into the Avengers' living quarters, "don't say, 'sing it, sister.' You're too white."  
  
"I'll say what I want to say," Jessica Jones informed. "For all you know, I was using it in a feminist context."  
  
"Like I've told Danny a thousand times, if you try to talk like you're from the ghetto, you make me look lame by association."  
  
"The man wears yellow pixie boots, and the thing that embarrasses you most is his use of slang?"  
  
Steve tuned out the cheerful banter, glaring at Tony. The Madison Square Garden security personnel and NYPD had thankfully believed the New Avengers when they'd insisted that the blackened and smoldering wreckage on stage had been a mind-control device, and had arrested Hathart. But gratifying as the thought of Hathart sitting in jail was, it didn't improve Steve's mood.  
  
There were smears of soot on Tony's armor.  
  
"You know, telling people they can't say stuff because it makes them sound stupid totally makes you the oppressor," Peter joked. "Next thing you know, you'll be misquoting the Bible."  
  
Logan snorted. "If making yourself sound stupid every time you open your mouth was forbidden, Spidey here would never get to talk."  
  
"That was unexpectedly mean," Peter said, pulling his mask off. "Or, no," he wrinkled his nose thoughtfully, "not really unexpected."  
  
"Tony," Steve touched Tony on the arm, the metal of the armor cool and hard through his gloves. "I need to talk to you."  
  
"Out on the balcony?" Tony nodded toward the glass doors that led out to the apartment's balcony.   
  
It was cold out on the balcony, a sharp breeze lowering the temperature by several degrees. Tony walked over to the railing, removing his helmet and resting it in the crook of one arm. Steve shut the door behind them, then turned to face him.  
  
"Explain to me why you decided it was necessary to blow the hate ray up."  
  
"I told you," Tony said, staring out at the city skyline, "it needed to be shut down immediately."  
  
"By blowing it up from a foot away," Steve said levelly.  
  
"It was the only way I could do it safely. It was too crowded to risk a long-range repulsor blast, so I needed to do it by hand. That way, I could direct the force of the explosion away from the crowd." Tony said this as if it were an entirely rational reason to blow himself up, one that no reasonable person could argue with.  
  
"You're sure it was the only way?" Steve asked, stepping closer to Tony. Tony had been cutting things much finer than Steve liked recently, taking needless risks with his powers and his own safety. "You're sure it wasn't just you being reckless?"  
  
"I wasn't... I don't take risks with other people's safety," Tony said forcefully. "I did my best to minimize the danger to everyone else; don't you think I've learned my lesson about that by now?"  
  
"Look, we were all being a little bit more aggressive than we should have been." He hadn't actually needed to punch Hathart once he'd collared him; he'd just wanted to. "Some of us may not have been thinking clearly in there." The hate-ray had been affecting all of them as well as the crowd; it was lucky that they'd managed to hold things together as well as they had.  
  
"I knew what I was doing," Tony snapped, rounding on Steve and glaring at him with red-rimmed eyes. He looked tired and worn.  
  
Steve's generalized loathing of Tiberius Stone increased. "But I didn't," he said, trying to moderate his tone to something less confrontational, "and a warning would have been nice. Tony, this thing with Tiberius... you know the rest of us don't blame you. Stone is-" He broke off. Tony was staring over Steve's shoulder at the glass doors, face blank.  
  
Steve glanced back over his shoulder, and saw nothing but their reflections in the glass. "Tony, are you all right?"  
  
"I'm fine," the words were abrupt, Tony turning back to Steve with a renewed glare. "Leave me alone." He looked oddly hunted, shoulders hunched and eyes lowered.  
  
The sky was a pale blue that heralded the beginning of winter, and Tony's armor glinted dully in the afternoon sunlight, the red and gold somehow less vivid. Wisps of cloud were scudding across the sky, and it felt as if the temperature had dropped five degrees in the last two minutes.  
  
"Are you sure?" Steve pressed, anger increasingly replaced by concern. "You've been different lately."  
  
"Sorry," Tony said, voice low. "I'm sorry if I've been different, and I'm sorry I didn't tell you what I was planning to do to the hate ray, and I'm sorry Ty is such a bastard," his voice was louder now, closer to a snarl, "and I'm sorry I have such lousy taste in lovers, and I'm sorry I didn't realize how to stop the armor sooner. There didn't need to be so much destruction, you didn't need to be nearly strangled; I should have thought of how to break the connection earlier."  
  
Steve remembered Tony's motionless chest under his hands, Tony with blue lips and no pulse and no hope. By the time the paramedics had gotten there, Logan had been trying to convince Steve to give up on the CPR, gesturing towards Tony's blue lips and slack, lifeless body and saying, surprisingly gently for Logan, that even if the EMTs were able to get Tony's heart beating again, it was too late to save him. He was fairly sure that the paramedics had only tried the shock paddles because they had been afraid of what Steve would do if they didn't.  
  
He'd been afraid Tony would never wake up, that he had thrown his life away to free Steve from the rogue armor that had had its metal fingers around his throat. It had been like watching Bucky die all over again, only worse, because this time, he ought to have been able to prevent it. Instead, he'd been oblivious, and Tony had been dying minute-by-minute under his hands, and nothing he had done had helped.  
  
And Tony was sorry he hadn't done it sooner?  
  
Steve closed his eyes for a moment, knowing that anything he said right now would be something he would regret, then opened them. "Warn me next time," he managed, voice surprisingly quiet and calm considering how angry he was. "Or better yet, don't let there be a next time." He turned on his heel and stalked back inside, not trusting himself to stay out on that balcony alone with Tony any longer.  
  
  
  
***  
  
  
  
"You know," Pepper said, tapping her fingernails on the edge of Tony's desk, "we do have an IT department. And they like it when they have some kind of work to do."  
  
Tony pulled his gaze away from his computer screen. Pepper had one hand on her hip, and was staring down at him meaningfully. "They don't have the clearance to rewrite the security protocols. I do." Technically SE's firewalls and anti-hacker security had been upgraded two weeks ago, and didn't need to be rewritten from the ground up, but he wasn't ready to go home yet.  
  
He hadn't spoken to Steve since their argument yesterday. He'd avoided him for the rest of the afternoon, and had left the Avengers' living quarters early, skipping breakfast, so that he wouldn't have to face him.  
  
He knew he had been acting irrationally when Steve confronted him. When Tony had turned to face Steve, Scott Lang and Clint Barton had been reflected in the polarized glass behind him, Scott staring at Tony sadly while Clint made faces at Steve.  
  
Steve was right. He probably hadn't been thinking clearly during the fight at the arena. How could he have been? He was going crazy. He had put people's lives in danger again; Steve was right to be angry.  
  
If it happened again, he would want Tony off the team. He made that clear, or as good as.   
  
And that would be well within Steve's rights. It was only his selfish need to stay an Avenger that had kept him from saying anything, had kept him from leaving already. Without the Avengers, without Iron Man, he was nothing.  
  
"It's eight o' clock," Pepper went on. "We finished any real work ages ago. Now you're just making up work because you're bored. I'm going home."  
  
"Good night, Pepper," Tony said dully, turning back to the lines of code in front of him. He liked computer code. It was comforting, always logical and ordered.  
  
"You know, I swear I remember a time when you were supposed to be some kind of playboy who had a date every night." Pepper sounded amused. "I miss that. It meant I got off before seven."  
  
Tony glanced back up at her; he'd had the impression that she had loathed all of the women he'd dated. Pepper was smiling, arching finely plucked eyebrows. That was new; Tony could remember when she'd done them herself, something that had always left them slightly uneven.  
  
"You once told a woman that I only slept with natural blondes and then rescheduled our date without telling me. She never spoke to me again."  
  
Pepper shook her head, a lock of red hair sliding loose from her bun. "Tony, please, please get a life, so that I can have mine back."  
  
Tony offered her an attempt at a smile, trying to look normal, and not like someone who was seeing dead people in his office windows. "You don't have to stay after five," he reminded her. "I'll see you tomorrow."  
  
Pepper left, closing the door behind her, and Tony returned his attention to the code. At least it was something he could control.  
  
Reverend Hathart's attempt to become a second Hate-Monger had been all over the news today. There had been cameras set up in Madison Square Gardens, so that Hathart's speech could be broadcast that evening, and the clip of Steve accusing him of using mind-control on people and Hathart dynamically failing to deny it had been on every single news station, including the ones Tiberius owned.  
  
Tiberius was busily disassociating himself from Hathart, claiming that he had been as much a victim of Hathart's manipulations as anyone else. Ty had always been good at that sort of thing.  
  
This morning, one of New York's representatives had introduced a Superhuman and Mutant Registration Bill in the House. It had Ty's fingerprints all over it.  
  
The bill was only in its very early stages, but now that the idea was out there... Tony really didn't want to think about how far it might go, but he didn't have a choice. And if it did go that far, the things they would have to do to keep everything from really going to hell were... He couldn't handle them, not like this.   
  
Tony rubbed at his eyes, which were dry and scratchy with lack of sleep. The dreams had gotten worse, the hallucinations weren't stopping, and he didn't know what to do.   
  
The clock on the corner of his desk read just after eight thirty. Tony stood up, pushing his chair back, and began to pace back and forth behind his desk. He knew exhaustion had to be making things worse, but maybe if he got himself tired enough, he'd be able to sleep without dreaming tonight. Even dozing for a couple of hours at his desk was better than the nightmares.  
  
The room went blurry for a moment, and Tony rubbed at his eyes again.  
  
The clock read two a.m.  
  
How could it be two a.m.? It had just been eight thirty moments ago. Tony automatically checked the clock in his armor, intending to reset the desk clock to the proper time, and froze. The armor's clock also said 2:01.  
  
It couldn't be two already; it had been only seconds since he'd last check the clock, not hours, and he couldn't possibly have fallen asleep at his desk, because he'd been standing.  
  
He was missing six hours.  
  
Last time he'd found himself missing time, he'd spent the lost hours killing people at a madman's direction. And before that, with Immortus... he'd been missing time then, too.  
  
What if the hallucinations weren't simply the result of his cracking under stress? He'd hallucinated things while under Immortus's control.  
  
Tony shook off the moment's paralysis and started pacing again, with short, jerky steps.   
  
Six hours. What had he been doing for those six hours?  
  
He reached out through the Extremis to check the building's security cameras; looking at the footage visually would take hours, but with the Extremis, he could mentally scan several different video feeds at a time. Nothing, nothing, nothing, until he got to the camera feed from the hallway outside his office.  
  
He'd passed that camera at three minutes after nine, on the way out of his office.  
  
He'd left his office. Where had he gone? What had he done?  
  
Tony's breathing picked up pace as he tore through the rest of the footage. He wasn't in any of it; not in the elevator down from this floor, not in any of the other hallways, and, thank God, no sign of him leaving the building-- No, wait, the security camera at the front entrance had picked him up coming in through the front doors, at one forty-five.  
  
He had gone somewhere. In the armor, out of the armor -- he didn't know. And God alone knew what he had done.  
  
He had to tell the others, had to tell Steve.  
  
No, he couldn't tell Steve. Couldn't let Steve know how badly he'd screwed up. Couldn't let Steve down again. Couldn't be kicked off the team. Couldn't hurt Steve again -- what if he hurt Steve again? What if he went near Steve and blanked out again?   
  
He couldn't live with that, not with that. It was why he'd stopped his heart, because anything, even death, was better than losing Steve.  
  
Tony squeezed his eyes shut, took a deep breath, trying to force himself to calm down. Panicking wouldn't help anything.  
  
He had to go to someone, do something. He could have been doing anything during the past six hours. What if he'd killed someone? Again?  
  
There was no one on the team he could go to, not without revealing everything to all of them. There was nothing Happy and Pepper could do, or Rhodey, and going to SHIELD had done him no good last time.   
  
If this wasn't him, if someone was doing this to him, making him see things, making him do things, then he needed to go to another scientist. And it had to be someone who could defend themselves if he lost it again.  
  
There was something he could do about that, at least, if only for a little while.  
  
After last month's disaster, he'd added an extra security feature to the armor, a set of codes that, when manually entered or mentally administered via the Extremis, would lock the armor down for twenty-four hours. It would leave him completely defenseless, but he wouldn't be able to hurt anyone else.  
  
Tony closed his eyes and transmitted the code.  
  
He didn't expect it to hurt.  
  
The shock of suddenly being severed from what was to all intents and purposes an extension of his body made the floor tilt for a moment, and he grabbed at his desk, steadying himself. There was an empty space in his head where the armor should have been.  
  
He was safe now, though. Well, safer. No, not safe. He was never safe without the armor. But he wouldn't be able to hurt anyone now, not until the armor came back online.  
  
Tony let himself slide to the floor beside the desk, drawing his knees to his chest. He needed help.  
  
  
  
***  
  
  
  
There was a pounding noise, Hank thought, dragging his eyes open. It took him another moment to identify it as someone at the door.  
  
"Hank," Jan said sleepily, shoving at him with one hand, "go answer that."  
  
"Why me?" It was three o' clock, and the floor was cold.  
  
"Because I'm naked."  
  
It didn't occur to Hank until he was halfway to the door that Jan could have easily put on clothing.  
  
The brownstone was dark, and he stubbed his toe twice getting to the door, hissing through his teeth at the pain. Whomever this was had better have a damn good reason for waking them up in the middle of the night.  
  
Hank yanked open the door, growling, "What do you want?"  
  
Tony was standing on the doorstep in his shirtsleeves, shivering in the cold October night. He was hunched in on himself, and Hank suspected it wasn't because of the temperature. His eyes were wide, pupils oddly dilated, and Hank's first two thoughts, forming almost simultaneously, were that either something had happened to Steve and the others, or that Tony was drunk. Or both.  
  
He dismissed the second almost immediately. If something had driven Tony back to the bottle at this point, he wouldn't be on Hank's doorstep, obviously looking for help.  
  
"Tony." Hank grabbed the other man by the arm and pulled him inside. "What's wrong? Did something happen to Cap?" Please don't let it have been that, he thought. They'd already lost enough Avengers.  
  
Tony shook himself, hard, and suddenly went from weirdly blank silence to a torrent of frantic words. "Hank, you have to help me, you have to, I can't-- I'm seeing things, and I lost six hours, I can't remember, and I'm going crazy, don't know if it's what Wanda did or the Extremis or-- someone might be doing this to me, what if someone's controlling me again? You have to help me, or tie me up, or drug me, or, oh God, what if I killed someone? I can't remember. I can't-- What if I killed someone?" He had his hands over his face now, his whole body shivering with fine, uncontrollable tremors, breath coming in sobbing gasps. "Armor's on lockdown for the next twenty three hours, but after that, I'll be too dangerous. I don't know what I might do!"  
  
This was not good. This was really not good. Whether someone was actually doing something to Tony, or this was some kind of mental breakdown, it was not good, and Hank had no experience trying to calm people down. He was generally the one other people spoke to in a loud, calm voice. What did Jan always do?  
  
Loud, calm voice. Right. "Tony. Tony! You need to calm down and explain what's happened. I can't understand you."  
  
Hank tugged Tony over to the couch in Jan's stylishly appointed living room and pushed him down onto it. "I'm sure we can figure this out," he said, despite the fact that he was sure of no such thing. "What do you mean, you might have killed someone?"  
  
"I might have, I don't know, I can't be sure," Tony shook his head, staring at the floor, still breathing rapidly. "I lost six hours, and the security cameras said I left the building. I don't know where I was, what I did. I could have done anything."  
  
"Tony?" Jan was standing at the top of the front staircase, wrapped in a blue silk kimono. "Hank, what's going on?"  
  
"I don't know," Hank said. "Something's wrong with Tony."  
  
"Sorry," Tony said, voice shaking. "I keep seeing dead people, too," he offered, almost apologetically, "but I thought it was just lack of sleep."  
  
Jan narrowed her eyes. "So you're missing time and hallucinating?" She came down the stairs, crossing the room to lay a hand on Tony's shoulder. "Don't worry, I'm sure Hank can figure this out."  
  
No pressure there.  
  
She turned to Hank. "What does Cap think?"  
  
That was a good point. Where was Steve?  
  
"You can't tell him," Tony blurted out, grabbing at Jan's hands. "You can't. The others can't know, I can't leave the team, I-"  
  
Jan pulled her hands away. "I won't tell Cap or the others," she said, and the lie was obvious to Hank, but clearly not to Tony, who nodded as if she'd just thrown him a lifeline.  
  
Hank had never seen Tony this out of it, not when he was sober, anyway. Not since Immortus.   
  
"I'm going to go put on real clothes," Jan said gently. "I'll be right back." She left the room with her spine stiff and angry. She might well be going to put on clothes, but Hank knew that, regardless of what she had just promised Tony, the New Avengers were about to get a wake-up call.  
  
Hank pulled Tony to his feet once more. "Come on," he said. "We'll go to the lab and see if we can figure out what's wrong with you." And it might be a good idea to take Tony up on that suggestion that Hank drug him. Not because he presented any particular threat at the moment -- if the armor was really in lockdown, than all Hank had to do if Tony tried anything was grow to twelve feet and swat him -- but because he was obviously in some kind of panic attack or shock. And if Hank was going to figure out what the hell was going on, he needed Tony coherent.  
  
  
  
***  
  
  
  
Steve was awakened by the sound of the phone. He reached for it blindly, fingers closing unerringly around the hard plastic of the handset. "Hello?" he mumbled.  
  
"What the hell is going on over there?" Jan demanded, voice low and harsh. "Why aren't you here? Do you have any idea what-"  
  
Steve sat up, rubbing at his face with his free hand. "What? Where are you?" he interrupted. "What happened?" Was there some kind of fight going on? Or a disaster, or another riot? The NYPD and emergency personal had procedures for contacting the Avengers, and none of them involved Steve's bedroom phone. Or Jan, come to think of it.  
  
"Tony's having some kind of breakdown in Hank's lab," she snapped, and Steve could hear the worry in her voice. "You're his teammate; what happened to him? How could you let him go off alone like this?"  
  
"Like what?" Breakdown? What did she mean, breakdown? "What's wrong with him?" Tony had been fine yesterday, stressed out over the situation with Stone, but otherwise fine. Steve tried desperately to remember any signs of illness or injury, and couldn't. There hadn't been any. Had someone attacked him? Had he gone out to fight something in the armor? Had Stone called him up and said something? Or had he been -- no, he couldn't have been drinking. Whatever else, Steve knew, Tony wouldn't do that.  
  
Jan's voice broke in on his building panic. "I don't know. That's what Hank's trying to figure out." She paused, then, "He told us he was missing time, and seeing things. He completely fell apart, Steve. And apparently he's locked the armor into some kind of failsafe mode that won't let him access it."  
  
Tony never cut himself off from the armor; Steve hadn't thought he could, now that he had the Extremis. If he had locked himself out of his armor, it meant he was afraid of what he might do in it.  
  
The control chip the hacker had used to turn him into a weapon was supposed to be gone. Tony had almost killed himself--  _had_  killed himself -- to shut it down.   
  
It had to be gone. This couldn't be that again. "Is he hurt? He didn't... do anything, did he?" Steve wasn't sure if he was asking whether Tony had done something to someone else, or done something to himself. He wasn't sure which thought scared him more.  
  
"I don't know," Jan said. "He doesn't remember. He's... pretty upset about that. Hank's still working on figuring out if he's a danger to anyone else, but he's definitely a danger to himself. You need to get over here right now."  
  
Steve said something, he wasn't sure what. It must have satisfied Jan, though, because she hung up the phone.  
  
He just sat there on the edge of the bed for a moment, staring blankly into the darkness. Something was wrong with Tony. Again. Something was wrong with Tony, and he hadn't noticed, and now it might be too late. Again.  
  
Steve shook himself, hard. He couldn't afford to panic right now. He didn't have enough information, needed to get over to Hank and Jan's and find out what was going on, and listening to the little voice in the back of his head that was insisting that the worst was happening, that Tony was being controlled again, that he was going to die, while Steve was helpless to prevent it, would accomplish nothing.  
  
Steve got up and dressed mechanically, costume first, then street clothes, and grabbed his shield off the floor by the bed and his motorcycle keys off the bedside table. The entire apartment was dark, all of the others asleep.   
  
For a second, he considered waking the rest of the team, but he didn't know what state Tony was in, or if he'd appreciate having the entire team descend on him. He was sure alcohol wasn't involved, but... not everyone would be. Dragging more people into this would only make things worse; Tony hated being a spectacle.  
  
The sudden wave of light when the kitchen door opened was blinding, and Steve nearly ran into Peter.  
  
"Cap! Sorry, I--" Peter broke off, blinking at him, a peanut-butter sandwich clutched in one hand. He was wearing blue-and-white-striped pajamas. "Where are you going? It's the middle of the night."  
  
"Um, out." Steve had never been any good at lying. "Something came up." He felt a pang of guilt at the deception -- Peter was Tony's friend, too -- but the last thing Tony needed right now was  _more_  people panicking over him. Steve already felt on the verge of panic, himself, and if he knew Hank, his old teammate wouldn't be any calmer. And as well-meaning as Peter was, he tended to panic loudly and at length.  
  
"What do mean, 'something'? Why are you sneaking out in the middle of the night without telling us?" Peter peered at Steve suspiciously, pointing at him with the sandwich. "Is this a supervillain 'something?'"  
  
"No." Steve shook his head. He could feel himself blushing with embarrassment over the-- not a lie. Concealing information from the rest of his team wasn't actually lying, just probably unethical. "It's personal." He'd almost said, 'Avengers' business,' but Peter  _was_  an Avenger; even now, though, there was still a part of Steve that couldn't help but think of the Avengers as himself, Tony, Thor, Hank and Jan, Clint, Wanda, and a few others, the ones who had been on the team the longest.   
  
"Sorry, Peter, I've got to go." Steve turned for the door. Behind him, he could hear Peter muttering,  
  
"Nobody ever tells me anything."  
  
Then Steve was out the door, thoughts already turned back to Tony and what he might find when he reached the Pyms'.   
  
  
  
***


	5. Chapter 5

Hank's lab was in the basement of the brownstone he and Jan were living in now, white plaster walls covers in printouts and charts that had been annotated in Hank's distinctive scrawl, long lab bench cluttered with test tubes, petri dishes, and a terrarium filled with ants. The smooth, poured concrete floor radiated cold, and even at four in the morning, the harsh halogen track lights cast everything into bright, harsh relief.  
  
Tony was sitting hunched over on one of Hank's lab stools, his face in his hands, looking upset and exhausted, but very much alive, and something tense inside Steve eased a little. Tony was whole; not unconscious, not crazy, not dead.  
  
Hank was sitting across the lab bench from Tony, half dressed and barefoot. "There's no history of schizophrenia or anything else that causes hallucinations in your family, and as far as I know, you've never-" He looked up as Jan opened the door, Steve at her heels, and fell silent mid-sentence.   
  
Tony slowly lifted his head from his hands and half-turned to glance over his shoulder at the doorway, then froze, eyes fixing on Steve. He shook his head slightly, looking trapped. "You said you weren't going to call them," he blurted out. "You promised."  
  
"I didn't," Hank protested. "Jan did."  
  
"Oh, very mature, sweetie," Jan said dryly. "I thought we should get one of the other Avengers in here," she said to Tony, voice gentle. Steve had heard her use the same voice on Hank when he was very upset or very spun-up. "We need to know what's been happening to you, and you've admitted yourself that you're not a reliable source right now."  
  
Tony didn't answer. He was still staring at Steve, motionless and wide-eyed like an animal with a foot caught in a trap.  
  
"It's okay, Tony," Steve said, trying to mimic Jan's calming tone. "We'll figure this out. Jan said you turned the armor off, is that right?" Jan had filled him in on everything she and Hank knew as she walked him from the door to the lab. Missing time. Nightmares. Dead people in mirrors. Why hadn't Tony said anything when it had first begun? Why had he waited until things got this bad?  
  
"It's on a twenty-four hour emergency lockdown." Tony sounded dazed, voice distant. "I checked that everyone in the tower was okay first, on the security cameras, and everyone was, but I left the building, and I have no idea where I went." Something about the way he said it was almost apologetic. "I don't know what I might have done."  
  
Steve wanted to protest that Tony couldn't have done anything, but they all knew that wasn't true.   
  
"I'm sorry. It's good that Jan told you. I shouldn't be on the team." Tony looked away, shoulders slumping further. There was resignation in every line of his body, as if he'd simply given up in the face of whatever this was. That wasn't like Tony. He never gave up.  
  
Steve couldn't think of anything to say to that, so he turned to Hank. "What is this? What's happening to him?"  
  
Hank shook his head, shrugging. "Like I was saying when you came in, this isn't chemical or neurological. He's got no history of any neurological problems that could cause this, and the toxicology screen I ran after I gave you the sedative and then realized I might have just done something monumentally stupid," this to Tony, "came back negative."  
  
"You drugged him?" Steve asked sharply.   
  
"It's okay," Tony told him. "I have a very high tolerance for depressants."   
  
Yes, definitely drugged. Tony didn't usually broadcast that sort of information, since everyone knew perfectly well  _why_ he had that tolerance.   
  
He had turned on the stool so that he was facing Steve and Jan, and the bright lights of the lab gave Steve a perfect view of the dark circles under his eyes, the crumpled dress shirt he'd probably worn to work, the tangled hair he'd obviously been running his hands through, and the dilated pupils that turned his eyes nearly black.  
  
He looked fragile, breakable, and he couldn't protect Tony from whatever this was, anymore than he'd been able to protect him from the hacker, or Tiberius, or even from his own demons.  
  
"I'd like to run some more tests and take another look at your blood," Hank said. "I ran a tox screen, but there are other things to look for. Unless this is some kind of post-hypnotic suggestion, or some telepath is influencing you, in which case there'll be no evidence and we'll have to call in Emma Frost."  
  
"She'd never forgive us for interrupting her beauty sleep," Jan said. "Let's hope for evidence; psionic powers and magic are a lot harder to fight."  
  
Tony nodded dully and rolled up one of his sleeves. He avoided looking at Steve as Hank drew a blood sample and put it under a very fancy-looking microscope.  
  
After a moment, Hank made a surprised humming sound. "Tony, come look at this and tell me what it is," he said, waving a hand to beckon Tony over without looking away from the microscope. "There's something here that's not organic. And if that's the Extremis, it's creepy."  
  
Tony obediently crossed the room to look, and Steve followed, resisting the urge to put a hand on his shoulder as he bent over the microscope. He wasn't sure if Tony would welcome it at this point.  
  
Tony put his eye to the microscope's eye-piece, fiddled with some knobs on the side of it, and went stiff. He straightened abruptly, whirling around to lock eyes with Steve for what was possibly the first time in a week, Steve realized with a sudden pang. "These are nanites. How did nanites get into my bloodstream?" Oddly, he looked almost relieved, some of the strained whiteness around his mouth fading. He certainly was more focused than he'd been a minute ago, eyes sharp, a frown creasing his features. "Hank, do you have anything that can magnify this further? We're going to need to take a closer look."  
  
Several minutes later, Hank and Tony had an image of the blood sample projected onto the lab's wall, displaying round, red shapes that Steve recognized as blood cells and two silvery, robotic-looking things. They looked sinister somehow, possibly because nothing that blocky and obviously inorganic was supposed to be in blood.  
  
"They look familiar," Tony said, squinting at the image.  
  
Hank frowned. "I don't know about familiar, but these look like they're designed to broadcast some kind of signal," he said, tapping one of the nanites with a finger.   
  
"It's a modified variant of Ty's old DreamVision nanites," Tony said, voice suddenly alive with excitement and relief. "I'm not crazy. It's Ty. He's doing this to me somehow." As soon as he'd spoken, he put a hand to his head, wavering slightly. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he pitched forward.  
  
Steve grabbed him before he hit the floor. "Tony? Tony!"  
  
It took Steve a long moment to ascertain that Tony was still breathing, though shallowly. He was limp and unmoving, a dead weight in Steve's arms in a way that was horribly reminiscent of that day a month ago. It didn't matter if Tony didn't return his feelings romantically; he was Steve's best friend, and Steve should have told him so. However Tony felt about him, what mattered was that he know that Steve cared about him, as a friend above and beyond anything else, and that he would do his best to help him, be there for him, no matter what.  
  
He couldn't lose Tony. He couldn't. What would he do without him?  
  
Steve looked up, arms full of Tony, to find that Hank had crouched down beside them, face full of consternation.  
  
"Hank," Steve demanded, "what's wrong with him?"  
  
***  
  
  
  
He opened his eyes and found himself staring up at a white ceiling, squinting against the glare of Hank's track lighting. Tony frowned. Less than a second ago he'd been talking to Steve, almost dizzy with relief from the knowledge that he wasn't insane, and then he'd just been dizzy. And now he appeared to be on the floor.  
  
No, not on the floor, he realized after a moment. There were flat pillows underneath him, the fabric rough against his fingertips -- he was laying on some kind of couch. Of course he was. Hank, being a man after Tony's own heart, could always be counted on to make sure his lab contained a place to sleep, so that he'd never have to leave.  
  
Tony rolled onto his side and pushed himself up onto one elbow. He did it tentatively, waiting for something to hurt. In his experience, something generally did after he passed out.  
  
He seemed to have been lucky this time, however; nothing hurt, and there wasn't even any lingering dizziness. Tony blinked, rubbing one hand over his face. Ty's nanites must have done something to him.  
  
"Oh, thank God!" Steve's voice, the relief in it so strong that Tony abruptly felt stupid for being so afraid to ask him for help.  
  
He was standing in the lab's doorway, staring at Tony as if he wanted to memorize him, crumpled shirt, stubble, and all. Jan and Hank were nowhere to be seen.  
  
"I was so worried you weren't going to wake up," Steve went on, coming to sit on the edge of the couch beside Tony, his thigh pressing against Tony's hip. "You passed out cold. Hank thinks maybe he overdid it with the sedatives. How are you feeling?"  
  
"Sane," he said, smiling just a little at Steve.  
  
"Good," Steve said, then leaned down and kissed him.  
  
Tony closed his eyes, leaning up into the kiss, filled with a sort of slowly dawning wonder. He'd never let himself think this might actually happen, but now it was, and Steve was sliding one hand into Tony's hair, strong, warm fingers cradling his face, and his lips were touching Tony's lips, and his tongue was...  
  
The fingers in his hair tightened, pressing painfully into his skull, the kiss turning more demanding, forceful enough to hurt.  
  
Eyes still closed, Tony pulled back just far enough to break the kiss, which was as far as the hand in his hair would let him. "Get off me, Ty."  
  
The fingers digging into his scalp let go, and Tony could hear fabric rustling and feel the weight on the couch shifting as Tiberius moved away from him.  
  
"How did you know?" Still in Steve's voice.  
  
"Because you kiss like you've paid for it," Tony said, opening his eyes.  
  
If he hadn't  _known_  it was Tiberius, he would have been utterly convinced that it was Steve bending over him. Every detail was perfect, from the way his shirt collar gaped open just enough to reveal a flash of blue leather to the nearly invisible blond stubble on his jawline. Even the little, concerned line between his eyebrows was perfect.  
  
It was so utterly, completely wrong that Tony felt sick. "Don't you dare wear that face. You have no right!"  
  
"But I thought this was what you wanted, Tony." Ty grinned, and it was Steve's grin, the broad, innocent, goofy one that made him look like a high school football player, and always made Tony feel warm somewhere deep inside and oh, God, Tiberius was taking this from his memories, from inside Tony's head, because there was no way he could have known what that smile looked like.  
  
"I thought this was what you saw in your dreams," Ty went on, the cheerful grin vanishing into a disapproving frown, Steve's square-jawed, stubbornly noble face. "Well, not lately, of course." He made a dismissive gesture that was entirely Tiberius. "Lately, things have been more like  _this_ ," and abruptly the lab was gone, white walls and bright light fading into the scorched and smoke-stained façade of the Avengers Mansion, roof and half the walls gone, ominously backlit by the reddish glow of sunset. There were bodies lying motionless midst the rubble. Clint, Thor, Wanda... Peter, looking very small. Hank, the yellow and black of the Yellowjacket costume muted by smears of ash and blood. Jan, tiny and crushed, lay atop his chest.  
  
Tony was standing on the lawn amidst the carnage, Tiberius -- still wearing Steve's face and costume -- at his side. Tiberius made a sweeping gesture, taking in the entirety of the mansion, and smirked at Tony. "Haven't they?"  
  
***  
  
  
  
"Going by his brainwaves, he's not actually unconscious per se." Hank frowned at the wavy lines scrolling across the monitor Tony was hooked to. "He's in some kind of dream state, so technically he's asleep."  
  
"How do we wake him up?" Steve asked, cutting straight to the important part. Tony was lying on Hank's lab table, hooked up to two different machines, one monitoring his brainwaves, and another his heartbeat. Wires sprouted from silver disks on his forehead and bare chest, like something out of an old science fiction movie. It was far too familiar a sight, and, as always, it hurt to see Tony this vulnerable.  
  
It filled him with a driving need to do something, anything, to fix Tony, and also with a burning desire to kill Tiberius Stone. Hopefully, these goals would coincide.  
  
"We can't," Hank said, voice flat. He began to pace back and forth beside the lab table, gesturing sharply as he spoke. "This has to be related to Stone; he's controlling Tony's brainwaves with those nanites somehow. He must have had some kind of failsafe in place in case Tony figured out what was going on."  
  
"If they're transmitting a signal, can't you just turn them off?" Jan asked. She was standing by Steve, only a foot or so away from his place beside the lab table and Tony. Steve guessed she was trying to be comforting. "Block the transmission, or shut them down with an EMP pulse, or something?"  
  
Hank shook his head jerkily. "Exposing people to electromagnetic pulses high enough to shut down this kind of tech is dangerous enough at the best of times. When the person in question is a cyborg, things get a whole order of magnitude more complicated. I might interfere with the Extremis, and shutting down  _that_  could kill him."  
  
There was a cold, hollow feeling in the pit of Steve's stomach. Tony was under some kind of mental control, they couldn't wake him up, and turning it off might kill him. Why did things always have to get so bad, so quickly with Tony? "There has to be something we can do," he said, not allowing it to be a question. Sitting by helplessly while Tiberius did whatever it was he had in mind was not an option.  
  
"I know." Hank half turned away for a moment, running a hand through his hair; it was a nervous gesture he shared with Tony.  
  
Tony hadn't moved at all, eerily still, his face lacking even the slight twitches people usually made in their sleep.  
  
"Whatever we do, we need to move quickly," Hank went on. "Before this kills him. Because there's a very good chance that it might." He started pacing again. "I didn't think anything of it at the time, but a few weeks ago, Dr. Richards was worried because Arcade had gotten his hands on some of Stone's DreamVision tech, when the company started selling off some of its defunct projects."  
  
"You think Arcade has something to do with this?" Jan interrupted, laying a hand on Hank's arm. "Tony never fought him, and the Avengers never really had anything to do with him, either."  
  
"This could kill him?" Hank had just said that it was safer not to try shutting it off. How was "a very good chance it might kill him" safer?  
  
"Arcade's dead." Hank twitched his arm away from Jan's hand. He was still pacing, three quick strides down the length of the lab, turn, and three steps back. "A few days after he bought Stone's VR toy, the police found Arcade dead in his house, hooked into the DreamVision machine. You know, the one that put Stone in a coma. I'm not positive, but I'd bet money that if you checked Stone's hospital record, that would be around the time he miraculously woke up."  
  
Jan frowned. "How did he die?"  
  
Hank glanced down at Tony, grimacing. "Apparently of a heart attack."  
  
"Right," Steve said grimly, "it's time to pay a visit to Tiberius Stone and ask him how to turn his toy off." And if Stone didn't feel inclined to give them that information, Steve would have no problem convincing him.  
  
They had his own technology crawling around in Tony's body as proof that he was involved. Stone wasn't going to get away with his sick little games this time.  
  
"It would be a pleasure," Jan said, through gritted teeth. "Let me get my costume."  
  
"I should-" Hank started.  
  
"Stay here," Steve interrupted. "We're not leaving Tony alone."  
  
"You know, I'm not actually a medical doctor."  
  
"Then call one," Steve ordered.   
  
Jan shook her head, setting one hand on her hip. "You might not be a medical doctor, but you've got more training than I do. I'm a fashion designer. If something happens, you at least have a chance of being able to help."  
  
Hank nodded, deflating slightly. "I'll call Hank McCoy," he said to Steve, and to Jan, "Hit Stone once for me."  
  
It took Jan less then five minutes to change into her black and gold Wasp costume. All Steve had to do was remove his coat and put on his gloves and mask.   
  
Hank was still in the lab, watching both Tony and the monitors carefully, so Steve couldn't say what he really wanted to say. Instead, he bent down and brushed that stray lock of hair that would never stay put back from Tony's forehead.   
  
As he went to join Jan at the front door, Steve carefully tightened the straps that held his shield in place on his back. He was going to fix this. They were going to fix this.  
  
He threw the front door open, ready to go hunt Stone down in his ostentatiously decorated lair, and ran straight into Spiderman.  
  
"Hey," Peter yelped, skipping backwards a step to avoid being knocked over. "Careful. Wolverine and I came to help you."  
  
Steve looked from Peter, standing on the Pyms' front steps in full costume, to Logan, who was lounging against the nearest street lamp, also in costume, managing somehow to look like he wasn't actually there with Spiderman but had coincidentally just happened to be in the neighborhood.  
  
"Also, um, we followed you," Peter said. "In case 'personal business' involved supervillains and explosions and things. Or, you know, the mob."  
  
"Fine," Steve said. "We're going after Tiberius Stone."  
  
"About time," Logan growled. He straightened from his slouch against the lamp post. "Lead the way."  
  
Steve nodded, and turned to Jan. "Can you give us a ride?" Jan had only recently developed the power grow using Pym particles, but she'd seemed to be getting a handle on it pretty quickly. At fifty feet, she would be able to get them downtown in only a few minutes.  
  
"I'm still not used to hearing that," Jan said, shaking her head but already starting to grow.  
  
"Um," Peter said, staring up at Jan as her head reached the level of the brownstone's roof and kept rising, "what exactly are we helping you with?"  
  
  
***


	6. Chapter 6

"You're a dangerous man, Tony." Tiberius slung a companionable arm across Tony's shoulders, using the other to gesture at the gutted shell of the Avengers Mansion. "Especially to your friends. I ought to know."  
  
Once upon a time, Tony wouldn't have thought anything of this kind of casual physical contact from Tiberius. Now, it made his skin crawl. "Oh, we were friends?" he asked, arching his eyebrows sarcastically. He ducked away from Tiberius's touch, turning away from the smoldering wreckage to confront the other man face-to-face. "That's funny, according to you, all you ever did was manipulate and use me."  
  
"When you think about it," Tiberius went on, sounding almost cheerful, "I got off lightly. Yes, you stuck me in a wheelchair and ruined my life, but at least I'm not dead. That's more than can be said for so many of the other people you've claimed to care about. Like poor, pretty little Fujikawa Rumiko." He waved a hand, and sudden Rumiko was standing next to him, both hands curled around one blue leather clad arm, her body practically draped against his. She was wearing the slinky black dress she'd had on when Tony had caught her in flagrante delicto with Ty; even in spike heels, she came up only to Ty's -- Steve's -- chin.   
  
For an instant -- just an instant -- it was as if Rumiko were alive again; the illusion of her was a perfectly detailed as Tiberius's mimicry of Steve. Tony had no doubt that if he were to touch her, kiss her, it would be precisely the way he remembered. After all, Ty remembered what Rumiko's kisses were like, too.  
  
"Tell me, what happened to her in the end?" Tiberius trailed one hand, suddenly bare of its red glove, down Rumiko's arm. "I've heard it was quite the tragedy."  
  
"Leave her out of this, Ty," Tony snarled. "She was never anything more than a pawn to you."  
  
"Yes, but what a lovely pawn." Tiberius gave illusion-Rumiko one last possessive caress, and then she vanished as abruptly as she had appeared. "She came to me willingly, you know. She recognized you for what you were; a shame she lost sight of it, but then, you can be pretty convincing."  
  
Tony kept silent, refusing to rise to the bait. Part of him wanted nothing more than to break Tiberius's jaw, but Tiberius was still wearing Steve's body, still speaking with Steve's voice. And even though he knew that this wasn't real, that it wasn't really Steve, it was incredibly hard not to listen to him.  
  
"And then there's Pepper," Tiberius went on, and the rubble and scorched earth faded away, to be replaced by one of Tony's old offices, the one he'd been in around the time Tiberius had first returned from Europe. Pepper was seated at her desk, working on a pile of paperwork, oblivious to the two of them. "Poor Pepper who's never done anything but support you. Thanks to you, she can never have children."   
  
The office door opened, and Tiberius grinned -- that familiar "aw shucks" grin that Tony loved -- as Happy limped in, his face a mass of bruises. "And what about her loving husband, the faithful chauffeur? In so many ways, he'd be better off if he'd let you die in that car crash all those years ago. Still a failed boxer going nowhere, yes, but at least he wouldn't have been shot by people aiming for you... how many times is it, now?"  
  
The worst part, Tony reflected, was that all of this was true. Pepper and Happy  _would_  probably be better off if they'd never taken a job at Stark Enterprises. All he'd ever done was bring trouble down on them, both as Iron Man and as Tony Stark.  
  
"Is there a point to all of this, Tiberius?" he asked, trying to sound disinterested, to avoid revealing that Ty was starting to get to him.  
  
"Not really." Tiberius shrugged eloquently. "It's just so amusing to watch you suffer."  
  
"You didn't have to drag other people into it," Tony told him. Reverend Hathart and all of the people who'd been manipulated by him, the media, even political lobbyists. "You didn't have to drag my team into it." If that anti-superpowers bill Tiberius's puppets were trying to push through the House of Representatives actually went somewhere, everyone who wore a costume or had any kind of powers was going to pay the price, all because Tony had defeated Tiberius and left him in a wheelchair. Tiberius had always hated losing.  
  
"Oh, right. Your team." And now they were in the living quarters in Stark Tower, both of them facing the giant oil painting of the five original Avengers that hung in the front hallway. "You know, it's amazing they've put up with you as long as they have. One of the perks of being the guy who bankrolls thing, huh, Tony?" Tiberius nudged Tony with an elbow. Tony took a pointed step away from him.  
  
Tiberius shook his head. "I mean, given how unreliable you've been in the past... The drinking, all of those leaves of absence over personal problems, and I have to say, that time you let the time-traveling warlord brainwash you into killing one of them was really something special. Eventually, they're not going to be able to deal with your next mistake."  
  
And now they were in the middle of downtown Manhattan, the site of the Avengers' final showdown with Tony's hacked armor. This time, though, instead of Tony lying on the ground, it was Steve, his throat crushed by the armor's mailed glove. It wasn't real, he knew it wasn't real, but it was still a long moment before he could focus on anything other than Steve, motionless on the ground, blue cowl torn off to reveal his pale gold hair.  
  
Then he noticed Peter, mangled and bloody and very obviously dead. And Luke, blood trickling out of his ears and nose from what must have been a full-on hit with one of the armor's sonic blasts; unbreakable skin wouldn't have been able to save him from that.  
  
Wolverine was still upright, though just barely, flesh blackened by repulsor burns healing as Tony watched. He had both half-healed hands pressed to Jessica Drew's stomach, bright red blood seeping between his fingers.  
  
"Last month could have ended this way so easily," Steve's borrowed voice whispered in Tony's ear. "If I hadn't stepped in this would no doubt be your precious Avengers' future."  
  
Tony swallowed hard, fighting the urge to fall to his knees at Steve's side. The sight of his crushed windpipe made Tony feel physically ill -- he could still see the red gauntlet wrapped around Steve's throat. It wasn't real, but it had come within seconds of being so. If he hadn't figured out how to stop the armor in time... and it had still been too late for that plane full of people.  
  
"More dead people, Ty?" His voice sounded rough, uneven. "You're getting repetitive."  
  
"Admit it; you're dying to know how I did it, aren't you?" Tiberius laughed. "I had you convinced you were going crazy."  
  
"Not really, no," Tony lied. Tiberius was still wearing Steve's form, as he had been all along, and Tony wasn't sure which was more wrong, him standing there wearing Steve's face, or the vision of Steve on the ground. It should have been him there, not Steve. This had been his fault. All of it was his fault.  
  
"In a way, you did me a favor," Tiberius said, ignoring him. "While my psyche was trapped inside the DreamVision matrix, I learned how to manipulate my environment at will. Everything you see," he waved his arm in a sweeping gesture at the blood and death around them, "is an extension of my will, my thoughts. Unfortunately, I was still trapped." He smirked. It was strange to see such a malicious expression on Steve's face. "Until that fool Arcade came blundering into my domain and showed me the way out. Of course, I had to kill him in order to do it, but that was hardly a loss to humanity."  
  
Wonderful. Someone else was dead because of him. Arcade may have been an obnoxious, two-bit crook, but he probably hadn't deserved whatever Tiberius had done to him.  
  
"Imagine my surprise when I woke up," Tiberius went on, "to the shock and joy of my doctors, and discovered that my prison had become my plaything. I can enter and leave at will now, Tony, and I don't need the control apparatus anymore. It's part of me now, the way your shiny new uplink to the world is part of you. That's how I'm able to do this, you know. Once I got my modified nanites into your body, all I had to do was mentally broadcast the signal, and your own neural interfaces made you see what I wanted you to see."   
  
That was... brilliant, actually. Tiberius had always been good; DreamVision itself had been a substantial accomplishment, but figuring out how to interface his virtual reality tech with the Extremis based on the limited information that he would have had access to bordered on genius.   
  
Tiberius was as good with virtual reality as Tony was with hardware, but somehow he'd apparently never been content with that, or maybe never been able to see it. At some point in their past, he'd decided that everything was a competition between them and it was a point of pride for Tiberius to win.   
  
Out of the corner of his eye, Tony caught a glimpse of flashing lights, and he turned to see an ambulance pulling up by the edge of the wreckage, strangely silent. The whole scene was strangely muted, the only sound coming from him and Tiberius.  
  
One of the paramedics knelt by Jessica Drew, then stood up, shaking his head. Another EMT bent over Luke, who had less visible damage than Peter and Steve, and might still be alive. He, too, shook his head.  
  
God, Luke's little girl wasn't even a year old yet. He was going to have to be the one to break the news to Jessica Jones, Tony realized. And MJ.  
  
Or he would have been, if any of this had been real. And it could have been real, so easily. All of them dead, Steve dead, because of him.  
  
"How the hell did you get your nanites into me in the first place?" he asked, dragging his eyes away from the bodies to look back at Tiberius. He wasn't going to let Tiberius know that he was getting to him.  
  
"I took a page from the Borgias." Tiberius held up his right hand, and the red glove vanished to reveal the gold ring he had worn at the party in Central Park. "I injected my 'poison' into you with a specially designed ring. After that, it was only a matter of time."  
  
He'd chalked Tiberius scratching him with that damned ring up to petty spite. In hindsight, he should have known that Tiberius already had some sort of scheme in the works, and been more suspicious. If he'd had his blood tested immediately afterwards, he would have found the nanites and they would have had the definitive evidence they needed to prove that Tiberius was not on the level, and none of the other man's schemes would even have gotten off the ground.  
  
"I'm not limited to DreamVision's virtual reality anymore," Tiberius was saying, still smirking. "I can use the DreamVision programming for almost anything, to manipulate any kind of digital image. Including, you'll be interested to know, security cameras. That image of you re-entering the building that had you so worried? Completely manufactured." He laughed. "All I had to do was have my nanites shut you down for a few hours and falsify a few seconds of video footage, and you did all the rest for me and drove yourself right over the edge. In retrospect, it was really a missed opportunity. I could have taken advantage of those six hours and had you doing something useful."   
***  
  
  
  
The front door to Stone's building was unlocked, and there were no security guards in sight. All of the lights in the lobby were off. The whole thing had "This is a trap" written all over it.  
  
Peter's spider-sense was quiet, but he felt as if it were already flaring as the four of them entered the building. Even in the dark, the lobby was remarkably ugly, and kind of evil. There was a giant painting of Stone hanging on one wall, and way too many tropical plants crowding the corners. They cast weird shadows in the light coming in through the front windows, making the place feel kind of like a jungle.   
  
The last time Peter had been in a jungle, an evil vampire/dinosaur-man had chained him up and forced him to see Wolverine naked. Also, he'd torn one of his spider-booties.  
  
Logan glanced around the plant-infested but security-personnel-free lobby and sniffed at the air. "This is a trap, you know," he announced.  
  
"We do have some experience with this, you know," the Wasp said dryly. She'd returned to normal size, and was walking at Cap's side, looking tiny next to his six-foot-plus height. Peter knew how that felt.  
  
"He knows we're coming," Cap said, striding into the room without a backward glance.   
  
"Oh, really," Peter heard himself babbling, "because that would have been nice to know before we actually got here."  
  
"He knows Tony knows it's him," Cap said, still in that flat voice, still not bothering to look at any of the rest of them, "so he has to know that someone is coming."  
  
Ookay. Cap was acting weird, almost scary. He might be a trained soldier and living legend, but he was usually one of the least scary hand-to-hand people Peter had worked with. Intimidating, because he was Captain America and he was a living legend, but not scary -- a far cry from, say, Matt, who as Daredevil could be very scary in a crazy, "I will rip your throat out with my teeth," sort of way, but was never intimidating.  
  
Cap, Peter was learning, took attacks on his teammates very seriously. And it probably didn't help that it was  _Tony_ whom Stone was screwing with; Tony, whom Cap had been giving frantic CPR to last month.  
  
Peter and Logan followed Cap and the wasp across the room, and Peter hopefully pressed the gilt button for the elevator -- and seriously, who had gilt elevator buttons? -- but nothing happened. The button didn't even light up.  
  
"It's broken," Peter said, because he had to say something.  
  
"It doesn't matter. Chances are Stone would have rigged it anyway." Cap nodded at the discreet door inset into the wall a few feet away. "We'll take the stairs."  
  
There were two dozen flights of stairs.   
  
They emerged from the stairwell into what Peter guessed was usually a receptionist's office, complete with uncomfortable chair for people to wait in before they got to go see the big man himself. Instead of a secretary, however, the room was occupied by the Wrecking Crew.  
  
Well, three of the Wrecking Crew. Bulldozer wasn't there; Spiderwoman's vemon blast must have been more effective than Peter had assumed. He'd thought the guy had just been whining when he'd done the "She blinded me! She blinded me!" bit.   
  
They were lucky he hadn't sued.  
  
"Well, well," the Wrecker said, tapping his crowbar against his palm, "look who's come to visit, boys. Just like Mr. Stone said." He grinned, teeth visible through the slit in his purple ski mask. "Guess he was right after all. Looks like we're gonna have some fun."  
  
"Where's Power Man?" Piledriver asked belligerently, stepping up to flank him. He held up his right hand, which was covered in an air cast. "I owe him one for  _this_."  
  
Peter cocked his head to one side, wrinkling his nose. "Does anyone actually call him that these days? I thought he got rid of that name when he ditched the tiara."  
  
Logan popped his claws, the soft sound carrying clearly, as it always did. "Cage stayed home. He had better things to do than play with you clowns."  
  
Cap reached for his shield, and the Wasp put a hand on his arm, halting him. "We'll handle this. Go take care of Stone." She began to grow again, not stopping until her head brushed the ceiling. "Hello, boys," she said, to the Wrecking Crew, "remember me?"  
  
Then she slugged Thunderball across the jaw.  
  
Logan went for Piledriver, which left the Wrecker for Peter. First things first, he decided, as he dodged a swipe from the man's crowbar, time to get the giant metal stick away from him before he used it to smash in Peter's skull.  
  
At least Thunderball didn't have his wrecking ball. Stone probably didn't want him breaking the expensive décor.  
  
Peter flipped himself up onto the ceiling, out of range of the Wrecker's second swing, and sent a stream of webbing at the crowbar. "You know," he commented, as he yoinked the bar out of the Wrecker's hand, "you really ought to get a better weapon. I mean, come on, you basically just hit people with a stick. Where's the dignity in that?"  
  
***  
  
  
  
Tony took a step towards Tiberius, his hands clenching into fists. "You bastard," he snarled. "I thought I'd killed someone!"  
  
Tiberius smirked, shaking his head with what looked like amusement. "I know. All it took was a little push, and you were convinced that history had repeated itself and you'd killed someone again." For a second, he wavered in and out of focus, Steve's features melting into Tiberius's, and then he was Steve again. "Oh, this situation has just gotten so much more fun," he purred. "Your costumed friends have just shown up at my office to confront me. Shall we assume it's some sort of pathetic attempt to save you?"  
  
Tony closed his eyes for an instant, blocking out the sight of the crumpled bodies around him. They were coming for him. "I mopped the floor with you last time, Ty. What kind of a chance do you think you have against the Avengers?"  
  
"Do you think I'd allow myself to be caught so unprepared a second time? They have to get through the Wrecking Crew before they can get to me, and if they do, I have a few little surprises waiting for them."  
  
He'd let Tiberius control this situation long enough, Tony decided abruptly. He needed to fight back -- why hadn't he been fighting back? Steve and the others were coming for him; he couldn't stand by uselessly doing nothing to help them. He reached for his armor, calling it to him, but nothing happened -- the under-armor stayed stubbornly inside his bones. All right, back to basics, then.  
  
The feel of his fist smashing into Tiberius's jaw was deeply satisfying, until Tiberius staggered back a step, eyes wide and hurt,  _Steve's_  eyes, and Tony hesitated for a fatal moment.  
  
Tiberius kicked his legs out from under him, flawlessly copying a move Tony had seen Steve execute countless times. Tony hit the ground hard, the impact knocking all of the air out of him, and found himself staring up at Steve's -- Tiberius's -- red boot, its sole planted firmly across his throat.  
  
"I have far more control over this reality than last time," Tiberius said, with a laugh. "What you see," he gestured at himself, then at their surroundings, "is nothing more than a projection of my mind. There's nothing you can do to hurt me here. I, however, can do quite a bit to you."  
  
The boot heel pressed down harder at the base of his throat, and for a long moment, he couldn't breathe, vision going black around the edges. He reached desperately for the armor, but of course, no armor materialized. Tiberius hadn't been lying when he'd claimed to have better control over the DreamVision.  
  
"So, you expect Captain America to rescue you?" Ty asked mockingly, his weight easing off Tony's throat, though the boot remained in place. "You might want to revise that plan. I'm having a very interesting conversation with him, now that I've got my men holding him at gunpoint. He doesn't want  _anything_  to do with you now that I've told him all about your... feelings for him. You should see the disgust on his face."  
  
"You're lying!" Tony wheezed, resisting the urge to reach for Ty's ankle in a vain attempt to push the boot away. He ignored the little voice in his head whispering that Steve had already been avoiding him, that he hadn't so much as spoken to Tony since Tony's shouted revelation that he'd slept with Tiberius. "Steve doesn't have to like people in order to rescue them," he said, to himself as much as Tiberius.  
  
He reached for the armor again, knowing that it was futile; even if Tiberius hadn't been the one controlling things here, Tony had shut the armor down himself, and he was left with that same hollow place in the back of his head where the armor was supposed to be, like trying to reach for something with a hand that was no longer there.  
  
Only that place wasn't entirely empty. He could feel the faint pulse of an electrical current, some kind of data transmission far simpler than the armor's systems. Its steady signals felt almost like... a heart monitor?   
  
Why on earth would there be a heart monitor here?  
  
There wasn't one, Tony realized. There was a heart monitor back there, where his body was. Back in Hank's lab. There was also, he discovered, reaching further, an EEG machine, a complicated mass of electronics that felt like one of the Ant-Man helmets, and a laptop wirelessly connected to the internet.  
  
He might have cut himself off from the armor, but Tony couldn't shut down the Extremis, and Tiberius didn't dare try; the Extremis was what he was using to link his DreamVision, to link himself, to Tony's brain.  
  
Tiberius might control this reality completely, but he didn't have control over the real world, and the Extremis was Tony's link to that.  
  
***  
  
  
  
Stone's office looked exactly the same as it had last time. Bare floor, ugly art, giant desk. Stone himself was in almost exactly the same position as he'd been in when Steve had entered the office last time -- behind his desk, with his hands folded in front of him, an unbearably smug smile on his face.  
  
"It's over, Stone," Steve told him. "We know all about your plans, and we have hard evidence of what you're been doing to Tony. It stops now."  
  
"Why?" Stone raised his eyebrows, looking unimpressed. "What are you planning to do about it? What's your evidence, a handful of nanites? No judge or courtroom is going to understand what they do, not to mention that Tony could easily have put them there himself. After all, who's to say they're not part of the Extremis?" His smirk widened into a grin. "No, Captain America, get used to losing. You're going to lose a lot once my new friends in Washington get their show on the road. All of you will."  
  
"I don't see anyone from Washington here now," Steve said. He wanted to drag Stone out from behind that desk and hit him until he reversed whatever he'd done to Tony and swore never to touch him again. He didn't, because he knew it would get them nowhere. "And once we bring Reed Richards and Henry Pym in to testify that those nanites are your work, then yes, I think a judge will believe us."  
  
There was a loud thud from the hallway, as something hit the floor so hard that the paintings on Stone's walls rattled. "That would be my teammates mopping the floor with your hired thugs," Steve added. "Who, by the way, the police are going to be very interested to learn about. As will your adoring public."  
  
"I think you're forgetting something." Stone was still smirking, looking entirely unruffled by the threat of being brought to justice. Steve had expected the man to get angry, to snarl and bluster like the cornered rat he was. Instead, he was calm, smug. Which meant that Steve was missing something.  
  
"I have your friend's sanity in the palm of my hand," Stone went on. He held one hand out, palm up. "I'm in his mind right now; I can make him experience anything I want. I suppose a noble, upstanding man like yourself would be willing to make sacrifices for the greater good, but something tells me you won't make that one. You see, I haven't forgotten that touching speech you made in his defense last time around."  
  
Stone could be lying, but Steve had no way of knowing for sure. His DreamVision had already killed one person, and he or some piece of his technology had put Tony in the state he was in now, despite the fact that he'd been working from a distance.  
  
He wasn't going to give Stone the chance to back up that claim, and he wasn't going to lose Tony, not like this. Steve shifted his weight onto the ball of one foot, bringing up his shield.  
  
"I wouldn't throw that," Stone said. "All I have to do is-" he closed his open hand into a fist, "and Tony dies. Or remains trapped inside his own mind forever; this sort of thing isn't an exact science. How long do you think it would take a man to go mad, stuck like that?"  
  
"Do it, and you'll be very, very sorry," Steve promised. If Stone killed Tony, Steve could -- would -- see to it that he didn't leave this room, but that wouldn't bring Tony back. He needed to put an end to this now.  
  
Stone laughed -- he was crazy, that was becoming increasingly obvious. "But I could do it so easily. Almost as easily as I could have the rest my guards kill you."   
  
He waved a hand, and the office's side door swung open, revealing two men in Stone Industries security uniforms. They were both wearing some kind of virtual reality visor over their eyes, and both were carrying guns.  
  
"The weak-minded are easy to control once the proper hardware is in place," Stone announced, sounding deeply pleased with himself. "Don't bother trying to reason with them," he added, "they're both wired into DreamVision via neural hookups in the visors. They hear and see only what I want them to."  
  
Damn it. That meant the two guards were essentially innocent bystanders, and therefore, he would have to try not to hurt them. Meanwhile, they would have no such compunctions about hurting him.  
  
Steve lifted his shield, hoping that it would appear, to Stone, as if he were raising it to defend himself if the guards shot at him. He would only get one chance at this, because once he'd thrown the shield, he would be completely open to those guns.  
  
Stone leaned back in his wheelchair, offering Steve an almost conspiratorial smile. "You should hear Tony. He's _begging_  me not to kill you. Or maybe he's just begging for it. It got much harder to tell once I made myself look like you." He smirked, the expression purely lascivious. "Who'd have guessed that he'd wanted you so much for all these years."   
  
***  
  
  
  
The Extremis worked just as well as it always had, now that he'd finally accessed it. Even without actually opening any connections, Tony could sense the background hum of the data streams around him. They were always present, even when he was asleep.  
  
As much as he might claim he was controlling everything, Tiberius obviously wasn't aware that the Extremis was still operational, or he would have made some attempt to use it manipulate Tony's perceptions from that source as well.  
  
"I know all about your pathetic little crush on him, Tony," Tiberius was saying. He was still wearing Steve's face, speaking with Steve's voice, as he had been all along, and the snide, contemptuous tone sounded unnatural coming from Steve's mouth.   
  
Worse yet, even though he knew damn well that this was Tiberius, it still hurt a little to hear contempt in Steve's voice. Steve's respect meant more to him than just about anything; he'd always dreaded the day he would inevitably lose it.  
  
"And your pathetic feelings of inadequacy," Tiberius went on. "All that self-hatred and guilt... It's always made you so easy to manipulate," he said, eyeing Tony up and down with a patronizing leer that looked completely out of place on Steve's lips. "As long as I'm in your head like this, I know everything you know."  
  
No, Tony thought. Not everything. He didn't know that Tony still had the Extremis, which meant that that was something he couldn't sense, even through the DreamVision. Which meant he had no idea what the Extremis, and the continual flow of background noise it brought with it, was like. When Tony had first acquired the Extremis, there had been times when that dataflow had been overwhelming, and his brain had been rewired from the ground up to accommodate it.  
  
Tiberius's brain was linked to the DreamVision tech, the way Tony was connected to the Extremis, but he didn't have any of the accompanying physical modifications. All the connections that Tony had programmed into his brain were jury-rigged add-ons for Tiberius. And most of those connections were made to handle output, not input, to transmit, not to receive. What had been overwhelming for him ought to be staggering for Tiberius.  
  
"And here I'd somehow gotten the impression that you were jealous of me," Tony said. He needed to keep Tiberius distracted, needed to locate the datafeeds from the nanites the other man had planted in him. If he could sense the machines Hank had him hooked up, he ought to be able to sense Tiberius's nanites, now that he knew that they were there. And if he could find them, he could access them.  
  
"Everything I had to work for simply fell into your lap. Wealth, power, success... You inherited it all when your father did you the favor of offing himself in that car accident. I had to take matters into my own hands."  
  
By staging a car crash of his own and killing his mother and father. All so that he could own his own company, too.  
  
There. Countless tiny signals all transmitting together, like a fiber optic cable, each nanite composing a single strand. "You really want to steal my life from me, Caesar?" Tony asked. He submerged himself in the black void of the Extremis, Tiberius's dream world going distant, as things always did when he did this. The hive mind of the nanites was slippery, hard to grasp, but once he'd managed to patch himself into one of them, he had them all, thousands of converging datapoints. It felt as if he'd been struggling to establish the uplink for an eternity, but he knew it was only a fraction of a second in real time. "Here you go," he said, his own voice sounding as if it came from far away. And then he flung the floodgates open as wide as they would go. The heart monitor; the EEG machine; Hank's Ant-Man helmet and wireless connection, and through it, half the internet; the cell phones of people passing by on the street; every single satellite Stark Enterprises had in orbit, and any other he could grab hold of. He accessed them all and funneled the information through the nanites and into Tiberius, enough different datafeeds that he almost whited out from the strain.  
  
His vision had gone dark around the edges, but he could still see the way Tiberius staggered, Steve's body dissolving back into his own, could still see the DreamVision's illusory surroundings melting into a featureless grey landscape.  
  
Or maybe that was just him.  
  
His head hurt.  
  
Everything went black.  
  
***  
  
  
  
"Who'd have guessed that he'd wanted you so much for all these years." Even if the meaning of Stone's words hadn't been sickeningly clear, his satisfied smile and the suggestive lift of his eyebrows would have made it obvious.  
  
Inside the dream scenario that Stone had Tony trapped in, he was doing... something sexual to Tony, something Tony might or might not be a willing participant in. While looking like Steve.   
  
How real was the DreamVision? Were the illusions just images and sound, or could you feel them, too?   
  
He was going to kill Stone. If he was hurting Tony, forcing anything on him that he didn't want... Even the chance that he was was enough to make Steve want to break his neck, possibly with his bare hands, and if he'd made Tony think that  _Steve_  was the one hurting him... He was going to kill Stone.  
  
But first, he had to do something about the two men with guns trained on him.  
  
He pivoted on the ball of his right foot, throwing his shield in wide arc towards the guards. In spite of -- or perhaps because of -- Stone's control over them, they were caught unprepared, the shield knocking the guns from both of their hands before rebounding off the wall and returning to Steve. He caught it without looking, and turned towards Stone.  
  
Keeping his voice even took effort, but Steve managed it anyway. Threats were less effective when you shouted. "I'm going to-" he started.  
  
Stone groaned sharply, and slumped forward over the desk, clutching at his head with both hands. His two guards collapsed to the floor like puppets whose strings had been cut.  
  
Steve crossed the room in two strides, hauled Stone upright by the front of his shirt, and slugged him.  
  
He couldn't hurt Tony if he was unconscious.  
  
Stone went limp, hanging heavily in Steve's grasp.  
  
"Damn. I wanted to do that."   
  
Steve twitched involuntarily at the sound of Jan's voice; he'd nearly forgotten that the others were there, forgotten that anyone but him and Tiberius Stone was present.  
  
He turned to see Jan standing in the open doorway, one hand on her hip. She looked faintly amused. She was flanked by Peter and Logan, the one with his expression hidden by his mask, and the other as surly-looking as always.  
  
"One of you check on those guards," he ordered, nodding towards the slumped forms of the security personnel. "Stone was controlling somehow; they might need medical attention. Spiderman, I need you to get into Stone's computer for me. I'm going to go through his desk. I don't think he's going to be answering any questions, and we need to find out exactly what he was doing and how he was doing it."  
  
No one argued with him, which was unusual, especially where Logan was concerned. Spiderman didn't even make any sarcastic comments. Either they were also worried about Tony, or Steve was a lot more intimidating than he had realized.  
  
Stone's desk drawers had ornate brass handles, the metal bright against the dark wood. As Steve pulled the first drawer open, the secondary meaning of Stone's taunts finally caught up with him.   
  
 _"Who would have guessed that he'd wanted you so much."_  
  
Stone hadn't just been bragging about what he was doing to Tony; he'd flatly declared that Tony wanted Steve, had implied that simply taking on Steve's form had been enough to convince Tony to consent to whatever he was doing.  
  
Steve probably ought to feel something over that that revelation. He had spent the past several weeks brooding over the fact that Tony had never shown any interest in him, and Stone had just turned that entire assumption on its ear. In one breath, he'd informed Steve both that one of his most private wish-fulfillment fantasies was true -- that Tony lusted after him -- and that he'd used that truth to take advantage of Tony in one of the most personal and vile ways possible. Even if he hadn't hurt Tony, even if Tony had been willing, even if Tony had enjoyed it, if he'd consented to sex with Stone because he'd thought Stone was Steve, it was still rape.  
  
The fact that it had only happened in Tony's head wouldn't make a difference, or at least, not enough of one, and if it hadn't been entirely... unenjoyable, that might almost make it worse for Tony. He'd feel as if he'd been complicit in it.  
  
Under the circumstances, Steve couldn't feel any pleasure at the idea that Tony did, in fact, return his interest. Mostly, he just felt numb, and slightly sick. He wasn't sure he'd feel anything else until he knew Tony was going to wake up. That he was going to be all right.  
  
  
***


	7. Chapter 7

He opened his eyes and found himself staring up at a white ceiling, squinting against the glare of Hank's track lighting. Tony frowned; he'd done this before. This time, however, whatever he was lying on was hard and cold rather than soft, and his head was pounding. It felt a lot like being hung-over -- even the general feeling of self-disgust was the same.  
  
There was something beeping in the background, the sound familiar, though he couldn’t place it. Tony groaned, reaching up to rub at his forehead, at the spot over his right eye where the pain was sharpest. He paused when his fingers encountered the patches and wires of an EEG machine, and he realized that the beeping was probably a heart monitor.  
  
Heart monitor. Tony closed his eyes again, reaching out with the Extremis, and immediately located the laptop and Hank's Ant-Man helmet. This really was Hank's lab. He was really awake.  
  
"Oh, thank God," Steve's voice breathed, and Tony froze, his eyes still shut. He was awake, wasn't he?  
  
"Steve?" Tony asked. Please don't be Tiberius, he thought. He couldn't do that again.  
  
"How do you feel?" Steve voice was level now, giving away nothing, and Tony rolled his head sideways, opening his eyes to see Steve leaning against the wall beside the door, about ten feet away. He was in his costume, the red and blue vivid against the white paint, but his head was bare.  
  
"Fine," Tony said automatically. "How long was I out?"  
  
"Two hours." Steve was staring intently at him, as if searching for something, but when Tony tried to catch, he dropped his eyes. "When you didn't wake up after Stone went down, we started to get worried. Hank said your nose was bleeding."  
  
"Oh," Tony said articulately. He closed his eyes once more; the fluorescent lights were too bright, humming in tune with his headache. He wasn't sure whether the pain was due to Tiberius's meddling, or if he'd done something to himself when he pulled that stunt with the Extremis. "What happened?"  
  
"After you passed out, we went after Stone. He'd hired the Wrecking Crew to guard his office building, so I don't think there'll be any problem putting him in jail this time."  
  
"Good," Tony muttered. "He set this whole thing up to get back at me. Sorry the rest of you got dragged into it."  
  
"It doesn't matter," Steve said. "The whole thing's come down around his ears now. Peter found specs for Hathart's hate-ray machine on his computer, as well as the details of the pay-off he'd been making to Hathart and the Wrecking Crew. Not to mention the Scorpion and a couple dozen other people."  
  
"That was sloppy," Tony observed. "Ty always did have to work things out on paper first." It had always annoyed Tiberius that Tony preferred to work hands-on, straight from his own head, but the fact that there were no blueprints to the Iron Man armor had proven to be a good thing on more than one occasion.  
  
Then he frowned, realizing that Steve hadn't come any closer since the start of this conversation. Normally, there would have been a hand on his shoulder as Steve bent over him and peered closely at his face, checking that he was really all right. Tony had spent years savoring all of those little touches.  
  
He turned his head toward Steve again, and saw him leaning against the wall in the exact same position he'd been in when Tony had first looked at him. His arms were folded across his chest, and he was still giving Tony that searching look.  
  
He hadn't put much stock in Tiberius's assertions that he'd told Steve all about Tony's feelings for him, or that Steve was disgusted by him, but why was Steve staying on the other side of the room and looking at him so strangely?  
  
Tiberius hadn't been telling the truth, had he? It had sounded like exactly the kind of thing Tiberius would say to try and upset him, of a piece with his statements that Tony would get his team killed, and that people were better off without him.  
  
But the fact remained that Steve hadn't touched him, come near him, or even met his eyes yet. If Tiberius had been lying, then... the last time Tony had really had a conversation with Steve had been that argument about blowing up the hate-ray. An argument during which he had admitted to sleeping with Tiberius, and more or less come out to Steve. He hadn't been thinking clearly, or, in fact, much at all at that point, but in retrospect, maybe that hadn't been the best of ideas.  
  
"Tony," Steve started, very quietly, "are you sure-"  
  
He broke off as the door beside him swung open, and Hank walked into the room.  
  
"See, I told you he'd wake up," he said -- to Steve -- before crossing the room to Tony's side and adding, "Isn't sanity nice?"  
  
"You know," Tony told him, sitting up slowly and cradling his head in his hands, "I don't think I every really appreciated your Ant-Man helmet properly until now."   
  
Hank blinked and glanced at the helmet, frowning. "What are you talking about? I haven't used that in a week."  
  
Tony gave the two of them a somewhat truncated account of what had happened after Tiberius had trapped him in the DreamVision, leaving out the dead bodies, discussions of the harm he'd brought down his friends, and Tiberius taking Steve's shape. "So I patched the Extremis into his DreamVision nanites and gave him a taste of his own medicine."  
  
"That must have been what caused the nosebleed," Hank said. "Please don't do that again. I had Hank McCoy come and take a look at you, and he said that there was nothing seriously wrong with you apart from being unconscious, but those nanites are still inside you, and that's going to be a problem."  
  
The prospect of having nanites designed to control his perceptions permanently lurking in his bloodstream was not a pleasant one. Thank God there was actually something he could do about that. "The Extremis is pretty much my immune system now. Now that I know they're there, I can convince the Extremis to recognize them as a virus and destroy them."  
  
"Good," Steve said. "That's good. Then there won't--" he broke off, then said, "he won't be able to do this to you again."  
  
Tony tried once more to catch Steve's eyes, and once again, Steve looked away.   
  
"Tony! You're awake!" Peter poked his head around the doorframe, the huge white eyes of his mask making him look startled. "And not braindead. Great!" He flashed Tony a thumbs-up, and then flung himself into the room with every sign of enthusiasm. "Cap told you how he kicked Stone's butt, right? We found all kinds of evidence in Stone's computer files. Did you know he was crazy? Like, Norman Osborn crazy. How come rich businessmen always turn out to be crazy supervillains? I mean, not you, obviously, um, 'cause you're not a supervillain."  
  
"Hello, Peter," Tony said dryly. It was nice to see that at least one person's night hadn't been ruined by his brief mental breakdown. He lifted his head from his hands and swung his legs over the side of the lab table, and as he did so, he saw Logan in the doorway behind Peter, one shoulder propped against the doorjamb. The pain in his head, which had faded from ice-pick sharp to a dull ache, gave another heavy throb. "Did you bring the whole team?" he asked Steve. They would all have heard about what had happened anyway; having everyone seeing him unconscious and stuck full of wires probably wouldn't make that much difference in the long run.   
  
"No," Steve said, sounding faintly apologetic. "I-"  
  
"Spidey and I followed him," Logan volunteered. "Cage and Spiderwoman are still back at the tower."  
  
"We need to fill them in on what's happened." Steve frowned slightly. "They're not going to be happy with me for keeping them in the dark."  
  
Tony winced. It was a safe bet that none of the New Avengers were very happy with him right now, given that he'd kept all of them in the dark. Steve especially wasn't, if Tony was right and that comment was actually a subtle dig at him. He'd kept Steve in the dark about more than just the hallucinations, after all, and Steve had never liked being lied to. Probably especially about little details like Tony's sexuality. "Sorry for barging in on you last night," he said to Hank. "You probably could have done without that."  
  
"Don't worry." Hank shrugged. "I probably owe everybody who's been on the Avengers at least one favor when it comes to that sort of thing. I'm sure Jan's going to want you to make it up to her, though. She the one who got stuck talking to the police."   
  
Which explained why she hadn't come in to poke at him yet, Tony reflected. "I'll think of something," he said. "Still, we should probably get out of your way."  
  
"You know you don't have to." Hank eyed him carefully, a slight frown between his brows. "You were out cold for two hours."  
  
"He's right," Steve put in, staring with great intensity at the floor. He rubbed at the back of his neck uncomfortably, adding, "Maybe you should stay here and rest a little longer. The rest of us can take off and you can catch up to us later."  
  
Tony stared down at his hands, letting his shoulders slump. Steve didn't even want to be in the same house with him.  
  
He'd never expected that. Uncomfortableness, maybe, possibly even disapproval, but not that. Still, he couldn't exactly stay away from what was both his home and his place of business just because Steve didn't want Tony near him anymore.  
  
"If I go back to Stark Tower, I can rest in a bed, instead of on a dissection table."  
  
"It's not a dissection table," Hank said primly. "It's where I keep the enclosed environment for the fire ants."  
  
"Even better." Tony climb down from the table, resisted the impulse to check his clothing for insects. Hank, thankfully, was not Scott Lang, and didn't usually let ants roam his house at will.   
  
Steve, Peter, and Logan had apparently taken the subway from downtown, and Tony wasn't entirely sure how he'd gotten from his office to Hank and Jan's house, so they ended up calling a car service to take them home-- technically, Tony could have called someone at SE to come fetch him, but there was no way he was waking Happy Hogan up at five in the morning.  
  
The day did not improve from that point on. Luke and Jessica Drew were, as expected, distinctly displeased at having been left out of the previous evening's excitement. Jessica Jones wasn't thrilled, either, though Tony wasn't sure if it was because Steve had left Luke out of things, or because Peter had found dirt on Tiberius that she hadn't been able to dig up.  
  
By lunchtime, Tony had developed a low-grade fever as the Extremis began ridding his body of the nanites, treating them the way it would a viral infection. By one o' clock, footage of Tiberius being taken into a police station to be booked was all over the news, Tiberius ranting loudly that it was all Tony's fault, laughing maniacally as he shouted that he was going to make both Iron Man and the Avengers pay, that he'd make all the superheroes pay. After everything that had happened, it was obvious that Tiberius had never been mentally stable, but now he had clearly gone totally over the edge.  
  
The laughter had an eerily vacant sound that made something inside Tony twist painfully. The Tiberius who had been his friend was obviously completely gone now. Ty had been the first person he'd ever kissed, the one who'd held him the night his parents died, letting Tony cry on his shoulder until he fell asleep in the other man's arms. Tiberius hadn't been that out of control when they'd been talking in the DreamVision; what Tony had done with the Extremis must have been the final straw.  
  
First he'd taken away Tiberius's ability to walk, and now he'd taken his sanity, probably for good. Even if all of their friendship had been a lie, that was a horrible thing to do to someone.  
  
Worst of all, Steve had continued to avoid him, staying at least six feet away from him any time they happened to be in the same room and carefully avoiding his eyes. By evening, Tony was reduced to hiding in his workshop, where he wouldn't have to watch Steve doing an awkward dance to stay on the outside of the invisible circle he seemed to have drawn around Tony.  
  
Four more hours, and the armor would be out of its twenty-four-hour lockdown. Maybe then he would finally stop feeling so shaky. His headache had lessened, but was still present, and had been joined by the full body ache and chill of fever. He was exhausted, probably because he hadn't gotten more than two hours of sleep last night, and those had hardly been restful, since he'd been passed out cold and hooked up to machines.  
  
He wanted his armor back, wanted to take back those hasty words to Steve he'd said out on the balcony, wanted to put his head down on a lab bench and sleep, but he was going to have to wait another four hours for the armor, and there was no way to take back what he'd admitted to. And he was afraid of what he might see if closed his eyes.  
  
***  
  
  
  
Steve had wanted to believe that Stone had been lying when he'd implied that he'd had sex with Tony in the DreamVision as Steve. Unfortunately, that was beginning to seem less and less likely. The more time he'd spent around Tony today, the more upset the other man had seemed, even though Steve had been careful to stay at a non-threatening distance.  
  
Since Tony had woken up in Hank's lab, Steve hadn't been able to bring himself to meet his eyes. He didn't want to know what had happened inside Tony's head, wanted to be able to ignore it until it all went away. But that wasn't going to help Tony.  
  
Tony already kept too many things to himself. For God's sake, he's spent the past couple of weeks thinking he was going crazy, and hadn't asked anyone for help!   
  
Over the years, whenever Steve had been upset about something, Tony had eventually come to him and dragged it out of him, whether he wanted to talk about it or not. It usually helped. There was no way Tony would talk about something like this of his own free will, but what Tiberius had done to him was obviously getting to him. Tony had never dealt well with losing control, either of himself, his technology, or a situation, and something like this was about as big a loss of control as you could experience.  
  
Tony had avoided eating dinner, and was now hiding down in his lab, like an animal retreating to its den to lick its wounds. Jarvis had actually come to Steve and asked him to go convince Tony to come upstairs and go to bed before he fell over, which meant that Steve couldn't put things off any longer.  
  
And as much as he dreaded the answer, Steve needed to know exactly what Tiberius had done.  
  
He found Tony sitting at one of the workbenches, his shoulders slumped as if he couldn't summon up the energy to sit up straight. There were a couple of quinjet diagrams spread out in front of him, but he was staring off into space blankly, apparently oblivious to them.  
  
Steve walked around to the other side of the workbench, into Tony's line of vision. Tony didn't react.  
  
"Tony?" Steve asked softly, not sure how to start.  
  
Tony blinked; it took a moment for him to focus on Steve, as if he were coming back from somewhere very far away. "Steve," he said dully, then looked away, down at the diagrams.  
  
"Are you all right?" Stupid question, since obviously the answer was "no."  
  
"I'm fine," Tony said, still staring at the diagrams. His voice was still flat, empty of emotion.  
  
As he'd expected, Tony obviously wasn't going to volunteer any information. He steeled himself inwardly and began, "When I cornered him, Stone, ah... he told me some of what he did to you." Deep breath, Steve, he told himself. You can say this. "He didn't... hurt you, did he?" Okay, he couldn't say it.  
  
Tony shrugged, looking away. "Mostly he gave me nightmares about dead people."  
  
"Oh," Steve said. That sounded fairly innocuous, but going by the way Tony looked right now -- unshaven, hollow eyed, with that slump in his shoulders that Steve associated with catastrophically failed mission or the consumption of large amounts of alcohol -- he was betting it had been anything but.  
  
"Ty's never been very subtle," Tony went on, still in that dull, defeated tone. "I'm just glad to know it was him; I was starting to think I might be going crazy."  
  
Oh yes, Steve knew all about  _those_  kinds of nightmares about dead people. The ones where you were back in 1945, in the Ardennes, identifying the corpses of men you'd spoken to only days ago, now frozen to the ground by their own blood, and looked down to find that the next mutilated body was Bucky's. And then you woke up, and couldn't even take comfort in telling yourself that the dreams weren't true, because the details might be wrong, but the most important part was all too real. "Why didn't you come to me?" he asked. "I have some experience with that kind of dream."  
  
Another shrug. "I didn't want to bother you." He glanced up at Steve, a little, self-deprecating smile playing over his lips. "Especially not after what happened with the armor. If I was being controlled again..." he trailed off, shaking his head slightly. "How could I let you down like that again?" He wasn't emotionless now; Steve could hear the anguish in his tone as he asked the question, voice catching, harsh, like a man walking on broken glass.  
  
"Let you..." Steve choked out, throat suddenly tight. "Tony, if anything, I've let you down. This is the second time you've been under mind-control since we started this team, and I didn’t notice either time. I’m sorry I let this happen to you." He reached out instinctively to lay a hand on Tony's shoulder, but caught himself just in time and stopped short, hand freezing in midair before falling back to his side. "And I'm so, so sorry Stone used me to hurt you."   
  
Tony stared at him, meeting his eyes for the first time in far too long. He frowned slightly, and then his eyes widened, and Steve could almost see the pieces falling into place in his head. He drew in a long breath, dropping his gaze back down to his hands, and said, very quietly, "When Ty had me under, he kissed me, and tried to make me think that he was you."  
  
Steve buried his face in his hands, filled with horrified misery. It hadn't been a lie. "Oh, God, I’m-"  
  
"Steve," Tony interrupted, voice very gentle, "that’s all he did."  
  
Steve sagged with relief, suddenly realizing just how heavily the thought of someone with his face taking advantage of Tony had weighed on his mind. He'd dreaded it, hated it, he'd known that, but now that he knew it wasn't as terrible as he'd feared, his knees felt weak, and the thought crossed his mind that maybe he should sit down.  
  
Steve stopped hiding behind his hands and looked back up at Tony, who was regarding him with a strangely gentle expression.   
  
"I knew it wasn’t you almost immediately," he said. "I just..."  
  
"What?" Steve asked, after several seconds had elapsed in silence.  
  
Tony sighed. "Look, whatever Ty told you about me, it’s not like that. But I," he looked down again, shoulders slumping once more, and Steve realized that Tony was about to try and reassure him by saying that he didn't feel anything for Steve but friendship. Even after all of this, the thought still stung.  
  
"I wanted it to be real," Tony said, so quietly that Steve could barely hear him, and surely he'd heard wrong?  
  
"I've imagined it so many time," Tony went on, still barely audible, still staring at his hands, "and Ty took that and used it... I’m an idiot. I deserved what I got." He fell silent, still staring at his hands, body utterly motionless.  
  
He looked so completely despondent; Steve couldn't stand by and watch him hurt like that and do nothing. Feeling as if he were moving underwater, he circled the bench to stand beside Tony.  
  
He was oddly aware of little details -- the roughness of Tony's goatee under his fingers as he cupped Tony's jaw in one hand, tilting his chin so that he was looking up at Steve; the warmth of Tony's skin; the slate-blue of his eyes and the thick, dark lashed that framed them.  
  
He leaned down and brushed his lips lightly against Tony's. It was barely a kiss, but it felt like more than that, like he was laying himself completely open to Tony, desires, feelings, everything. Everything he had never said.  
  
"That was real," Steve said, barely above a whisper, as he pulled back.  
  
Tony stared up at him, wide-eyed, utter amazement on his face, and Steve had a moment to wonder if he'd made some terrible mistake before Tony stood, eyes never leaving Steve's face, slid his fingers into Steve's hair, and molded himself against him, kissing him hard. There was an odd tinge of desperation to it.  
  
Steve wrapped his arms around Tony, closing his eyes, and moaned low in his throat as Tony ground himself against him, wrapping a fist around Steve's belt and slipping one hand up under his shirt. Then he remembered that Tony had been through substantial amounts of emotional trauma last night, hadn't slept in about twenty-four hours, and had been molested by a supervillain who'd made himself look like Steve. Considering all of that, maybe doing this wasn't the best idea right now, no matter how much either of them wanted it.  
  
Regretfully, he turned his face away, breaking the kiss. "Tony."  
  
Tony pressed a kiss to the corner of his jaw, then another to the side of Steve's throat, and Steve said, more firmly this time,  
  
"Tony. Maybe we shouldn't do this right now."   
  
Tony pulled away, letting go of Steve. He blinked at Steve dazedly, looking baffled. "Why?"  
  
"You've been through an awful lot today," Steve said, stumbling awkwardly over the words, "and, um-"  
  
"Oh," Tony said, almost visibly deflating. "I... right." He took a small step back from Steve, and Steve could almost see him composing his expression. "You didn't have to do that, just because I..."  
  
And Steve realized with a jolt that Tony actually thought that Steve was rejecting him somehow, or had only kissed him out of pity, or -- Steve wasn't really sure exactly how Tony's mind was working at the moment. "No, no, I wanted to. Want to. A lot. Trust me."   
  
Tony looked unconvinced.  
  
"What kind of a martyr do you think I am?" the words just burst out, more sarcastic then he'd meant to sound, and he rushed on, adding, "I've wanted you for years. You’re so passionate, and dedicated, and you introduced me to Tolkien, and... when I was completely alone and didn't have anything, you gave me a place to stay and a purpose." He would have been completely loft and adrift, fifty years away from where he belonged, if the Avengers hadn't taken him in, and Iron Man had been the first one to really be a friend rather than just a teammate. "And I couldn't stand it that Tiberius Stone got to have more of you than I did, when all he ever did was try to hurt you. Last month, when I thought you were dying... I want to," he finished lamely. "I do. Just not right now."  
  
Tony was smiling now, a small, intimate smile. "I didn't know you felt that strongly about the Lord of the Rings." He sighed, though he didn't stop smiling. "You're probably right."  
  
"Not to mention that Jarvis sent me down here to make you go to bed, and I don't think that's the sort of going to bed he had in mind," Steve said, returning Tony's smile. He could wait a few days, until Tony looked less haggard and shaken up. The fact that Tony was here, and all right (mostly), and smiling at Steve like he belonged to Steve; that was the important part.  
  
"I was sort of trying to avoid that," Tony said, looking faintly embarrassed. "Sleep hasn't been much fun lately, and my armor is still off line."  
  
He had to be exhausted, Steve reflected, because he wasn't usually so obvious about how much safer he felt with the armor on or close by. "I thought Stone's nanites were gone," he said.  
  
"Mostly," Tony agreed, "but it's not as if any of us need nanites in order to have a bad night's sleep, at this point." He closed his eyes, rubbing at his forehead with one hand. "I just... Would you mind staying the night? Just to sleep."  
  
Steve flashed to the sight of Tony lying motionless on Hank's lab table, hooked up to machines that would tell them if anything went wrong with his brain or his heart, but wouldn't enable them to do anything about it. Tony wasn't the only one who was going to have nightmares about this. "I wouldn't mind at all."  
  
  
The End


End file.
